Facebook launched a new, official plugin yesterday allowing tighter integration on your website. You can now easily enable Facebook comments on your posts and pages, auto-publish posts to your Facebook timeline, allow Like/Send facilities for each post, as well as tag individuals and pages in your posts.

This WordPress plugin makes your site deeply social by integrating functionality from Facebook.

It seems a pretty large plugin in terms of file size, and is probably not the best resource in terms of your site load time and performance, but I’m going to give it a go. Check it out at http://developers.facebook.com/wordpress/ or on the repo at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/facebook/.

Update:

After giving the Facebook plugin a good test run I’ve decided to use the recently polished Disqus plugin to serve commentary on my blog posts rather. The Facebook plugin seemed bloated, and a little buggy in places, with the zip itself being over 900kb, and causing some of my pages to hang sporadically on load. 

Andy specially learnt & performed this song for our wedding day. 3 years later, after much pestering he has finally recorded his version of “Lovely Tonight” by Joshua Radin, as part of his #carsessions, and made it available on YouTube, accompanied by a thoughtful, raw and honest post about his fear of failure on his website. Definitely worth a read.

Since my last post around 9 months ago my personal life has been dramatically re-designed. My wife and I moved out of our very comfortable sea-facing flat, bought and drastically renovated a house in suburbia, and a month ago had a baby son called Maximilian, all the while I’ve been hugely busy at WooThemes which has been growing exponentially.

I’ve been in two minds what to share on my site lately, that’s when and if I found the time, now with the realisation that my child might one day stumble on it! My archive of posts is an assortment of personal journeys, snippets of online entertainment and sweet nothings. All of which makes for quite a conundrum in deciding what direction I should now take with my site and should I start afresh…

I decided the best starting point in getting me back on my feet was to re-design my site. I’ve minimised the theme styling, going for a responsive layout, and included a strong focus on Twitter and Instagram on the homepage, as most the time it is much easier to micro document the activities I want to share on these platforms.

I decided to keep my archive, albeit it’s volatility, as it captures my maturity as a designer, and the internet as a whole since 2005. I like to think of it as a time capsule, not one that Max might find entirely interesting, but one that and can be tweaked and re-engineered over time.

A beautiful mid-winter sunset sky, shot from our balcony on Saturday 16th July. Part of a longer series I’m shooting in and around Sea Point, Cape Town that I hope will see the light of day at some point…

Very much experimental, and lots still to learn, but if you are interested in the setup:

• Canon 7D with Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8 L.
• Shot at f/2.8 Aperture Priority with a 6 second interval between shots. 817 photos – until the shutter speed > longer than the time interval, and it shutdown…
• GBDeflicker used in After Effects to help with perceptible brightness fluctuations.
• Photo-JPEG Compression.
• iMovie for sound and titles.