Hopefully this isn’t too late, I meant to repost this early but you parents know how the end of the school year goes…

These mortar board caps are made from poster board and foam core… easy and fun to celebrate a graduation milestone.  I reverse engineered this from the Boy’s last year Kindergarten grad hat.

Get all the instructions here: How to make a kid’s mortar board/graduation cap

My 5 year old has discovered the world of iPhone games, and loves Angry Birds.  So in honor of him, here’s a roundup of some fun Angry Bird things you can eat, play with, or make!

EAT THESE:

Twitter bud @robynski shares the how-to on making Angry Birds cookies on her blog

Angry Birds Cupcakes at Confessions of a Cookbook Queen

Angry Birds Cake! via Great White Snark … plus you can buy Edible Angry Birds cake toppers.

And a Playable Angry Birds Cake… Really!  via Craftzine

Also found at Craft, Make Angry Birds Bagel Sandwiches!

Bento Box Angry Birds by My Mealbox! (via neatorama)

MAKE THESE:

Needle felted adorable Angry Birds tutorial at Craft

How to make an Angry Birds magnet game at Geek Crafts

At Superpunch – Papercraft Angry Birds – download them here.

Angry Bird Plushies at My Paper Crane

Having an Angry Birds themed party?  Here’s how to make your own balloons!

and..{Free Printables} Angry Birds Party Printables

Angry Birds in Lego at Craftzine

Just for fun…

Real Life Angry Birds video

Facebook pages are generally pretty boring, and I have a client who wanted a fancier facebook landing page.  So I decided to create one for Foodwhirl to see how difficult it was, before I costed it for her.  And, though a little complex (once I figured out that facebook was no longer supporting FBML and I needed to use iFrames, i found this great tutorial) , it wasn’t too hard for my mad web skillz.

If you haven’t “Liked” foodwhirl, just go here: http://www.facebook.com/Foodwhirl to see it!  And of course, Like foodwhirl while you’re there.

If you have friended Foodwhirl on Facebook, you can still see the page, just click ‘Welcome’ in the list in the left sidebar.

NOTE: if you’ve enabled secure browsing in facebook (https:), you’ll get an error message first.  Just click to go to http for that session, and you’ll be able to see it.

If your WordPress theme came out prior to 2.9 or 3.0, it won’t have support for the Featured Image functionality.

To enable the functionality, you need to add this line to your functions.php file.

if ( function_exists( 'add_theme_support' ) ) {
  add_theme_support( 'post-thumbnails' );
}

Once you do this, you’ll see “Use as Featured Image” next to the Insert Into Post button. (You’ll also see a Featured Image box under the Post Tags box on the right side of the Edit Post page)

If you’re just trying to fix the Facebook issues we talked about yesterday, and you’re using the plugin I suggested, this is really all you need to do to set a specific image to come up on Facebook.

However, this Featured Image won’t do anything else for you, unless you implement ‘featured image’ functionality elsewhere in your theme.

The following is for those who aren’t afraid of messing with their theme files:

So if you want to actually USE the featured image, as say a thumbnail for your for your posts on your archive pages, or something like that, you’ll have to make a few more changes to your theme.

If you want to add thumbnails to your posts.

Let’s say you aren’t using any sort of thumbnailing functionality right now.  On your category page, you just show an excerpt.  If you want to add your thumbnail sized image to display next to the excerpt, add this to your category.php file right above where you see <?php the_excerpt(); ?>:

<?php if(has_post_thumbnail()) { ?>
 <div class="thumb">
 <a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_post_thumbnail('thumbnail'); ?></a>
 </div>
<?php } else { ?>
<?php } ?>

This basically says “If the post has a Featured Image set, then show it in the thumbnail size (and have it link back to the full post)” .  If not, don’t do anything (I left the ‘else’ in there in case you wanted to do something different if it wasn’t set)

If the image display looks odd, you can fix it with css.  In your style.css file, you can set the styling for the thumbnail with something like this .

.thumb {

float: left;
padding-bottom: 5px;
padding-right: 10px;
padding-top: 0;

}

If you already  have some sort of thumbnailing functionality, and you want to use the featured image when it’s set:

Look for where you are displaying the image next to the post.  You’ll want to tell the file to look and see if a featured image is set, and if it is, display that.  Otherwise display the image using whatever method you were using prior (unless you want to go set the featured image on every past blog post, which wouldn’t want to do).

<?php if(has_post_thumbnail()) {      ?>
 <div>
 <a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>">
   <?php the_post_thumbnail('thumbnail'); ?></a>
 </div>

 <?php } else { ?>

whatever you were doing before

<?php } ?>

Example:
 <div class="entry-summary">
 <?php if(has_post_thumbnail()) {      ?>
 <div class="thumb">
 <a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_post_thumbnail('thumbnail'); ?></a>
 </div>

 <?php } else { ?>
 <a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" title="<?php the_title(); ?>">
 <div class="thumb"><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>">
 <?php get_attachment_image($post->ID, 'thumbnail', 'alt="' .
    $post->post_title . '"'); ?></a></div>
 <?php } ?>
 <?php the_advanced_excerpt(); ?>
 </div><!-- .entry-summary -->

where green text = the new text that was added

There is tons more you can do with featured image functionality. You can set up custom sizes to use other than the standard thumbnail, medium, and large, for example. But this is a good start.

My dear twitter bud Carissa (@carissarogers) asks:

“hey, any idea why sometimes images DON’t show up correctly when ‘liking’ a post for FB direct from site?? Like the sidebar comes up etc..”

Why yes, yes I do!

Basically, when you “Like” (click a facebook icon) within a webpage, or when you link to a webpage from Facebook, Facebook reads the information on your webpage to figure out what to display.  But it is not necessarily smart enough to know which text or image is really the relevant one, which is why sometimes you see really silly things in the facebook link, like icons, instead of the photo related to the page or article.

So what Carissa really wants to know is, is this something that can be fixed.

Facebook reads what are called Open Graph tags to figure out what to display.  If the tags don’t exist on the webpage, it makes a guess as to what those tags should be, based on the page content.

If we look at Carissa’s main page in Facebook’s URL Linter, we see that Facebook is extracting the ‘title’ from the <title> in her blog source, and getting the image to display from some random thing on her page tagged <img>.

The same thing happens if you enter the URL for a specific post – the image is just picked from anywhere on the page.

If you want to see what Facebook will display on a post or a page, you can use the Linter to find out.  It’s more reliable than just typing the link into Facebook, because Facebook will cache images and may not display a change when you change the image.  Using Linter also refreshes the cache.

So if the extracted information is not what you want displayed on Facebook, you’ll need to provide Facebook more information so that they’ll know what to display.  You do this by setting Open Graph tags.

So how do I set the Open Graph tags?

I wrote up a longer (slightly more techie) , explanation at the Dabbled Studios blog: Why don’t my blog photos show up on Facebook when someone Likes a post?

…but here’s a quick answer that will work for many of you.

If you have a WordPress blog, like Carissa, the quickest simple fix you can do is to install a plugin which sets the og:image tag for each of your posts to either the attached image, or the ‘featured image’.  I’m sure there are several out there, but try this plugin:  FetenWeb image_src Metatag.
I’ve used this one on a few sites, and it will pull the featured image (if you’re using that functionality) or the image attached to the post for facebook links.  You can also set a default image, in case you don’t have any image on the post.  It’s simple, and seems to work quite well.  If you have multiple images on a post, and you want to ensure that just a particular one shows up, be sure to click ‘Set as featured image’ for the particular image, within your image upload in WordPress (assuming your theme has that functionality activated)

If that doesn’t work for you, because your site is more complex, or doesn’t use WordPress, read more about setting the Open Graph tags.

Update: How to add featured image support to your WP theme

Interesting:

• cool photography- a seventeen year old does some fab self portraits:  http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/stunning-selfportraits-by-a
• the ‘slice house’ – check out the pool. http://fb.me/VKVnUMak

Crafty: awesome pendant idea (using recycled materials!) from @zakkalife http://fb.me/MkoJNo5u

Funny/Nerdy: Awesome! Sci Fi Ikea! http://www.collegehumor.com/article/6500868/sci-fi-ikea-manuals >>>>

Also, it’s a little late for mothers day, but love this Alien mother cartoon @ SuperPunch http://superpunch.blogspot.com/2011/05/mothers-day-cards-featuring-alien.html

Cute Find: cute robot lightbulbs :) http://www.swiss-miss.com/2011/05/alessis-light-bulbs.html