As part of Facebook’s growing push to simplify its advertising offerings, the company announced Monday that the commonly-used page post link ads will become easier to use and customize.

Page post link ads are usually a brand’s best bet to drive conversions from Facebook, and the company wants to make them easier to create. One of the main complaints from advertisers regarding this ad unit is the lack of customization available. Advertisers previously have been unable to upload a new and optimized teaser image to accompany the ad, so Facebook built this capability and launched it Monday.

Additionally, Facebook simplified the flow for unpublished page post link ads and improved the process of creating an ad.

Facebook announced changes to the creation of page post link ads in a blog post:

Choosing the right image is essential to creating a great ad, so we’re are rolling out image customization for Page post link ads across all of our interfaces, which means more flexibility for advertisers in choosing their creative. With this feature, advertisers can upload any image they believe will drive the most conversions to their website (rather than Facebook’s automatically sourcing a thumbnail image based on images on the linked site). Image customization is now available via the Page composer, create flow, Power Editor and the API.

Facebook is continuing to do more in the realm of unpublished posts, so that way brands can create an ad without having to promote an already-published post. Now the page post link ad has received this treatment.

Since advertising is a highly visual endeavor, Facebook reworked the flow for creating a page post link ad, so advertisers can see how it will look not only in the News Feed, but in the sidebar, as well. This way, advertisers can choose what kind of ad they want to publish:

We know Page post link ads in News Feed can outperform domain ads on the right-hand side, and we want to encourage marketers to take advantage of this enhanced performance for off-site conversions. So now when a marketer enters an offsite link as the ad destination, rather than defaulting to a right-hand side format, we’ll automatically allow advertisers to choose a domain ad for the right-hand column and/or an unpublished Page post link ad for News Feed. This removes the guesswork when transitioning from advertising on the right-hand side to advertising in News Feed.

Advertisers: How do you feel about the changes to the creation flow of page post link ads?

Rumors are circulating that Facebook may be adding video to Instagram at its June 20 product announcement. Many news outlets suggested that Facebook would be introducing a news reader prior to this speculation.

The introduction of video to Instagram would be a direct response Twitter’s video sharing service, Vine. Since its public release for iOS in January, Vine has grown significantly in popularity and its release for Android earlier this month has only bolstered this following.

There are several clues suggesting that video may be the next step for Instagram, which now boasts of 100 million active users. For example, Facebook has prevented Vine from using its friend-finding feature. By doing this, Facebook looks embed users into their platform first, rather than a service like Twitter.

Another instance of Facebook protecting its brand is how it is preventing Instagram uploads from being posted directly onto Twitter. Users can still share Instagram photos on Twitter, but users need to click the link to see them. By directing users back to the Instagram platform, users will spend more time in the photo sharing application. It also helps with ubiquity for the Facebook and Instagram brands.

From another perspective, it would also be strategic for Facebook to introduce short video sharing to its ecosystem. With talks of adding auto-play video ads into the News Feed, Facebook could be looking to familiarize users with the concept. With more users sharing short videos, video ad units may not seem as intrusive.

For the June 20 product announcement, Facebook sent snail mail invitations with the outline of a coffee mug. Though this motif would suggest that Facebook would be announcing a news product, some have speculated this as simply a diversion to the actual announcement. With the introduction of hashtags last week, it is also possible the social network may be introducing an improved blogging platform made more powerful with Graph Search. Though it may be one of these assumptions or the other, it is likely that Facebook will add all of these features in the nearby future.

Main image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Facebook recently introduced something that has been a staple of social media for years — hashtags. However, hashtags on Facebook feel somewhat incomplete. Facebook only rolled out hashtags on Wednesday to a portion of its users, leaving brands unable to take full advantage of this new feature, as many users were bewildered.

While Facebook’s younger and power users, who are also on Twitter and Instagram (where hashtags are the norm), may have understood, it confused others who aren’t on those other social channels.

So why did Facebook introduce support for hashtags, which are now searchable and clickable for some users? As other sites have speculated, Facebook (empowered by its acquisition of Storylane) could possibly announce on June 20 a revamp of notes or some other kind of blogging service that would serve as a Tumblr competitor. While this is not to say that Facebook will unveil such a product, it could happen in the future. Someday, users might be able to sort through posts and notes searchable by hashtags.

A Facebook spokesperson told Inside Facebook why hashtags were first rolled out to only a portion of users:

In regards to the rollout, we are starting small and hope to reach all users in the next couple of weeks.

While it was frustrating for many users who heard about the hashtags and assumed they’d be able to use them immediately, it’s understandable that the rollout process followed pretty much everything else Facebook has done in the past. Facebook traditionally introduces a new product to a portion of its userbase, examines how they use the product, and then continues rolling it out to a larger audience.

Could the rollout of hashtags signal that Facebook may be working on a way to see what friends are posting about by topic? One of the must frustrating things about Graph Search now is that users can’t find what friends are talking about. Hashtags could be the first way to solve this, but Facebook hasn’t released this capability publicly.

Something Facebook could announce on June 20 is a strengthening of its blogging service, to become a quasi-competitor with Tumblr. Facebook isn’t afraid to emulate other platforms, though the track record for doing so is hit or miss. When Facebook came out with the Poke app for iPhone users, it was basically a way to fire back at Snapchat — the texting app where messages dissolve in seconds. Facebook was betting that the ability to connect with Facebook friends through Poke would make it popular.

The acquisition of Storylane shows that Facebook does want to be a place where users write about what’s on their minds, and in more than just the status update box. By utilizing hashtags, it would further connect users to the things they want to read about — namely, what their friends are posting about. Right now, the hashtag search function is rather weak. You can see posts from friends at the top, but then it’s just a most recent list of posts from all over the Facebook ecosystem.

Even in the announcement of hashtags, Facebook called it a “first step,” showing that there is likely more to come:

Hashtags are just the first step to help people more easily discover what others are saying about a specific topic and participate in public conversations. We’ll continue to roll out more features in the coming weeks and months, including trending hashtags and deeper insights, that help people discover more of the world’s conversations.

By rolling out a stronger and more prominent version of Facebook Notes, it would allow users to add tags to entries, much like on WordPress and Tumblr. Then, users could easily bounce between posts their friends have written (or discover new public entries). Other than clicking on a user’s Timeline, scrolling utilizing the browser search feature, there’s not really a great way to index posts around a certain topic.

If Facebook goes in this direction, it could certainly be powerful, not only from a user standpoint, but from a marketing standpoint. Advertisers could further target ads to people who have posted about certain topics, making ads more relevant for users.

While Facebook is very tight-lipped about releases, word usually does leak somewhere. Even if Facebook does not announce some kind of hashtagged blogging service on Thursday, it could be something the site adds later on.

As various Facebook execs have discussed, the company wants the social network to be a place where someone’s true self shines through. What better way to do that than through blogs?

Hashtag image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Facebook habitually prompts users to like more pages. The site will ask you to like similar pages after you’ve liked pages, and now some users are seeing prompts on their News Feed to like pages their friends have recommended.

For some users, there’s a notification in the birthday/events area of News Feed, which leads to a list of pages that their friends have liked. It will also ask the user to promote a page that they manage.

Readers, have you seen this?

The Best Online Web Tech Comics

PC Weenies
The PC Weenies have appeared online since 1998. The primary audience for this 3-times-a-week comic are technology enthusiasts, engineers, systems administrators and software developers. You can subscribe to get each comic delivered to your inbox.

Joy of Tech
Joy of Tech is produced by Geek Culture, and they put out about 14 cartoons each month. You can subscribe to the RSS feed to keep up to date. At the time of writing their cartoons are being published on their account at Taptastic http://tapastic.com/series/288 , but archives can still be found on their own site.

My Extra Life
This site contains fewer cartoons than most of the others in this list. Created and produced by Scott Johnson, they are more a collection of one man’s thoughts than anything else. But definitely worth a mention in this compilation.

Dilbert
Dilbert is probably one of the best known tech comic strips. With a daily offering from the Dilbert creator, Scott Adams, you can sign up to receive the cartoons via email.

Penny Arcade
As the name would suggest, Penny Arcade is a collection of cartoon strips based on gaming, but nonetheless techie. For many of the cartoons in their archive you have to have some idea of the current games that are trending.

User Friendly
These cartoons are very techie, and the daily dose of tech comedy could lighten the day for any computer geek!

Geek & Poke
Some great geeky cartoons, you can get your dose through RSS feed two or three times a week.

Kopozky
A regular cartoon strip created and produced by a web design agency.

OK/Cancel
OK/Cancel is a comic strip collaboration co-written and co-illustrated by Kevin Cheng and Tom Chi. The subject matter focuses on interfaces, good and bad and the people behind the building of interfaces. This site is not up to date, but there is a huge archive to browse through.

Help Desk
Join Alex, the imperturbable and mildly amoral Help Desk support technician, and his colleagues and workmates as they make excuses for shoddy software, fight off Apple’s attempts to take over the world and make the world a better place.. for Ubersoft. Written by Christopher B. Wright.

CTRL+ALT+DEL
Written by Tim Buckley and published three times a week, the CAD cartoon strips focus mainly on gaming and computing themes.

The Brads
Brad Colbow creates 3 series of cartoons: The Brads, .Net and First World Problems. All are excellent in both content and presentation, and can be viewed on his very simple, minimal website.

XKCD
Cartoons created by Randall Monroe on mainly geeky subjects such as web, gaming, tv and film. The site’s by-line states: “A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language.” If you want to keep up with these comic strips as they are published you can do so via RSS feed.

Conclusion

Taking a small amount of time out each day to smile at these comic strips could possibly be a great tonic to set you up for a highly productive day. Just knowing that others suffer the same problems on a day-to-day basis and are able to turn them into something amusing could be a super-boost to keep you motivated.

Have we missed out any great techie comics from this list? Please share your opinions and links with us in the comments section below.

Authentic Themes launched on June 4th, 2013. The company was founded by AJ Clarke and Matt Tucker. This new store offers an incredible bundle of 20+ WordPress themes for only $40. Which is basically a steal at $2.00 per theme.

Their original goal was to offer a simple & affordable WordPress theme experience. By building marvelous themes for a variety of niches, Authentic Themes allows people whom are just starting out to stand out of the crowd. Their themes are well coded, simple to use, and easy to customize.

We’ve seen a growing interest amount the WordPress community for theme memberships. The entire idea of paying once and downloading brand new themes every month is very attractive. Plus, you can use the themes for your personal and commercial projects. What’s not to love about that?

Today we collected a few of their brilliant themes for you to check out. We usually don’t promote companies on a specific manner, however Authentic Themes is too great not to share. The current theme you’re reading this article on was actually created by AJ Clarke. I’ve been using this theme for almost a year, and haven’t had a problem. I love their service and wish them further luck in the future!

Minim

Minim is a simple blogging WordPress Theme. The theme is clean, minimal, and spacious making it a picture perfect for for travel, food, tech, business, news, gossip, design and all other blogs.

Demo & Download

Monogram

Monogram is an elegant WordPress theme designed specifically for blogging. The minimal design allows the reader/readers focus on the content without any distractions. This fundamental theme supports multiple post formats (standard, featured image, video, and quote) and features social icons in the footer. It’s great for writers!

Demo & Download

WordSmith

WordSmith goes back to the basics. No fluff, only your high quality content. The theme is perfect for bloggers, writers, novelists, poets and authors.

Demo & Download

Mission

Mission is a contemporary business WordPress theme. The light palette and ethereal style are functional and fashionable, and the theme has all the great features you’d want like callouts, services, portfolio (with post formats), custom shortcodes and much more.

Demo & Download

Grid

Grid is bright, beautiful, and bold  portfolio WordPress theme. It’s perfect for aspiring designers, developers, artists, agencies and anyone who desires to make an effect with their body of work. The theme options a robust grid layout, lightbox image support, and impressive typography. When someone visits your website, your work will speak for itself.

Demo & Download

Agency

This corporate business WordPress theme was created with businesses, agencies, freelancers, and young professionals in mind.  Clean lines, clever styling, full-width slider, expert portfolio, and stunning services make this theme and excellent choice for your website.

Demo & Download

Minifolio

A compact WordPress portfolio theme developed for you to showcase your work. Ideal for inventive, this theme features a homepage slider, detailed portfolio, full blog and much more.

Demo & Download

Polaroid

Shake, shake, shake it like a Polaroid picture. Was that lame? Perhaps. But this compact WordPress theme isn’t. Developed for you to showcase your work, Polaroid is ideal for the inventive. The theme features a detailed portfolio, homepage slider, full blog, and much more.

Demo & Download

Blocky

Blocky is a left aligned blog/photography WordPress theme. Create a responsive grid of your projects and showcase them to clients and followers. This is a great theme for photographers, designers, and other creatives.

Demo & Download

Scope

Scope is a professional WordPress theme. Get your business off to a great start with a homepage slider, main and secondary navigation, callout, portfolio post kind (supports default, image, video, etc.) and services post type.

Demo & Download

Zoom

A theme for photographers. Easily produce a casual blog of your everyday pictures, or compose a skilled portfolio to show to potential shoppers/clients. The clean layout and stunning post gallery support make this an outstanding photography theme.

Demo & Download

Valient

Valient – a masonry grid photography WordPress theme. Add and share your pictures with friends, followers, and clients. The unique left aligned vertical navigation and thoughtful styling makes your content pop.

Demo & Download

Kraken

Kraken was designed to incorporate all of the features needed by tiny to giant businesses, agencies, freelances, and professionals. A gorgeous portfolio, outstanding services, economical blog, and awesome homepage template are just a few of this theme’s features.

Demo & Download

Writer

Writer is a clean, minimal, and simple WordPress theme created for bloggers & photographers. The theme features a one column layout without a sidebar which is good for those trying to share their thoughts, photos, and/or videos.

Demo & Download

Board

Board is a suave theme designed to offer your users the best browsing experience on your portfolio & blog. This responsive theme includes a portfolio, shortcode plugins, contact form styling, and is translation ready.

Demo & Download

Journal

Designed for portfolios and blogging, this elegant WordPress theme can additionally be used for: studios, graphic designers, architects, hand crafts, and much more.

Demo & Download

Magazine

Magazine is a delicate magazine WordPress theme for news & blog based websites. 2 navigation menus, a featured homepage slider, and designed-in ad house are just some of the highlights of this lightweight and airy theme.

Demo & Download

Prometheus

Perfect for all types of bloggers, Prometheus includes a minimal grid-vogue post layout (a pair of, 3, 4 column options within the theme panel), widgetized footer, and a widgetized sidebar on the post pages. This smooth theme makes it easy for your content to standout.

Demo & Download

Lefty (Free)

Lefty is a premium left-aligned WordPress theme created with bloggers in mind. The clutter-free and modern theme makes Lefty the perfect theme for bloggers of all sorts.

Demo & Download

Apollo (Free)

Apollo is a minimal Free WordPress Theme created with bloggers in mind. The 2 column grid layout for your archives is great for showcasing all sorts of content. Sign up for your free membership to download this theme and use for your own site!

Demo & Download

This post will highlight some aspects of parallax scrolling that you need to keep in mind if you want to use the effect for your or your client’s site. As you probably know, the parallax scrolling effect is all the rage now. Many brands use it on their sites to both entertain and engage their audience even more. Also, pretty much all major web design providers offer parallax scrolling designs to their customers.

The thing is, they don’t seem to care that much about the SEO aspect of the effect because most companies offer one-page parallax designs regardless of how it can influence SEO rankings. Sure thing, such designs are visually appealing, but if you look under the hood, you can see some unexpected pitfalls. Before we go any further, let’s see what is actually wrong (or can be wrong) with the parallax scrolling effect and what you can do to fix those issues.

Parallax is Heavy

Since all the content is on one page (in one file), all your text, images, and videos (if any) are placed in the same file. And that goes without saying that such an approach makes your page way heavier than it could be otherwise. So, for starters, you need to optimize your images. You’re not really supposed to use any retina images as of now because not that many devices can enjoy them. If you’re absolutely sure that you need retina-optimized images on your site, at least make sure to load them only for retina-ready devices. You can do that with the help of retina.js or a similar JavaScript library.

Parallax is Keyword-Poor

It’s good practice to optimize your page for 1-3 keywords. So, if you have 5 pages in your site, you can optimize each for 1-3 words, which means 5-15 keywords per site. Now, if you use a one-page parallax design, you’re constrained to just 1-3 keywords. That’s another reason to break your one-page design into multiple pages. I’ll offer you a few solutions down the road.

One H1 Only

You’re supposed to use one H1 tag per page. Otherwise it’ll be considered bad practice by major search engines. You also want to use your keyword in the headline. Since your whole site is one page, you can use one H1 tag per your whole site. Another limitation right in your face.

Meta Data and Parallax

Meta data is pretty much the information about what your site or page is all about. Although it won’t directly influence your SEO, you’ll definitely be able to see the disadvantages of using the parallax scrolling effect in your one-page site. That said, let me explain why. Meta data consists of meta title and meta description. They are displayed on search results pages when you do some Google research.

You can have one title and description per page. Again, your site is one page… So, if you have one set (title and description) of meta data, it means that there’s only one way to find your site in SERPs. It’s like having one door to enter a house. If you had 3 pages in your site, it would be like 3 doors to enter, etc. Don’t you think that using a one-page parallax scrolling site is like trying to get rid of as many potential visitors as possible?

Not Good for Responsive

If you want to both use the parallax scrolling effect and make your site responsive, you’ll have to face a whole lot of obstacles because it’s pretty hard to make a parallax site display properly on all sorts of devices. So, in case you’re sure that you need both the technologies on your site, be ready to shell out. That’s because you’ll need a real pro who has the skills to make your site both responsive and with a parallax scrolling effect.

Parallax Lights

You can actually apply a slight parallax effect that won’t influence your site in any major way. Plus you won’t have to mess around with any coding. Such a method is explained in this post. In a nutshell, you can just use a user-friendly parallax background builder to generate your code snippet that you’ll have to just copy and paste. You can use the tool for adding your effect to WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and other CMSs or plain HTML sites. The downside of that approach is that you can’t really customize it to meet any whimsical need and you can apply it to your background only. So, if you need more flexibility, you’ll have to get your hands dirty with some HTML5/jQuery coding or just buy a ready-made parallax scrolling design.

Non-tech fix

Basically, you may just want to use all sorts of gimmicks and visual effects on your homepage and place links to external pages that contain your actual content which you want to be indexed by search engines. That’s a non-tech workaround, but it works just fine if you can move your important stuff to external files. So, it’s a no-brainer in fact. Now let’s take a looksie at a few techie solutions.

PHP Fix

There’s another way to make your site more SEO friendly, but you need to make sure that you’re comfortable with PHP. I’m not going to go into details now, but the general idea is to create a few PHP files that contain content for different pages, such as ‘about-us.php, ‘contact.php’,etc. That done, turn your homempage HTML file into a PHP one. So, your new homepage should be entitled ‘index.php’. Now you can just load the content of your external PHP file into your homepage file (index.php). One of the PHP methods that you can use is as follows:

$stream = fopen(“file.php”,”r”);

$string = stream_get_contents($stream);

fclose($stream);

You need to place this chunk of code to the spot where you’d like to load the content of your external file to and replace ‘file.php’ with your actual file name, such as about-us.php, contact.php, etc. Now you can use a headline (h1), meta title, and meta description in each .PHP file. Search engines index PHP files just fine nowadays.

jQuery Fix

In case you want to use a client side solution, you can load an external HTML file with the help of jQuery. For starters, connect to jQuery with this line of code:

// CDATA[
src="
// ]]>https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.1/jquery.min.js“>

Now just create a paragraph and assign the ‘result’ id to it (

) now inert this chunk of code where exactly you want to display the loaded HTML content:

$(‘#result’).load(‘about.html’, function() {

//alert(‘Load was performed.’);

});

Basically, the code will insert the content of your about.html file between your paragraph tags

.

Just like with the PHP method, now you have seperate files for different content of your site. You need to load content for different sections of your one-page site as described above. The cool thing is that visually you’ll have the same parallax site, but this time around the SEO aspect is fixed.

Conclusion

The parallax effect is a very popular trend now, but you can land in hot water if you implement it improperly. Again, the effect itself is OK and it’s worth it if you’re sure that you have a creative design idea for your particular audience. The source of the parallax scrolling effect problem is the fact that it’s usually designed as one file. That’s not good for your SEO. You can effectively  fix the issue either with the help of PHP or jQuery.

It is said that if diamonds and jewels are everything for women then luxury cars and super cars are everything for men. Cars have always admired people. There are many beautiful cars in this modern world. Luxury cars are expensive obviously but the joy of driving them is out of this world. Following are some of the most beautiful and inspiring examples of real life luxury cars for your enjoyment.

The Miami Heat are tied with the San Antonio Spurs in the best-of-seven NBA Finals at two games each, but the Heat are crushing the Spurs on Facebook, according to PageData.

The Heat, who are led by the 9th-most popular athlete on Facebook (LeBron James), have nearly 7 million more Facebook fans than the Spurs. They’re also the most-talked about team of the NBA Finals and are gaining the most fans.

Here’s a PageData comparison of the two teams:

San Antonio gained the most likes of the Finals on Wednesday, June 12, one day after the Spurs took a 2-1 series lead. Miami saw its highest increase in Facebook fans on Friday, the day after the Heat tied the series at 2-2.

During the Finals, the Spurs hit their PTAT high on Thursday, June 13, which was the day of game four of the series. The Heat’s highest PTAT figure also came Friday, so it appears that Miami is riding high with Facebook momentum heading into Sunday’s game five.

Photo courtesy of Domenic Gareri / Shutterstock.com.