If you previously had a Google Friend Connect widget on your non-blogger blog, you may have noticed that it stopped working on March 1st. Google Friend Connect has now been replaced by Google+ Pages. In this tutorial I’ll be sharing how you can create your own Google+ page for your avatar, brand or blog.
With all the commotion of Google disabling accounts of SLers and with lots of uncertainty still in the air regarding this topic, I believe the best way to have a presence on Google+ is to create a Google+ page for your brand or avatar.
Registering: Go to https://plus.google.com/u/0/pages/create to create a Google+ Page. You will need to create a Google account in order to do so, if you don’t already have one.
Choosing a category: Choose the appropriate category for your brand, blog or avatar. I created my Google+ Page for my blog therefore I chose “Product/Brand” and then “Website”. You can choose the category that best suits you.
Customizing: Once you’ve registered and chosen a category, you will be asked to customize your page’s profile. This is your chance to add a tagline that describes what your page is about and add your logo or profile pic.
Editing your page: To further customize your page, you will find a blue “Edit Profile” button on the top right hand corner. Once clicked you will go into an edit mode where you can add further information about your page. You can click each section, fill in the info and then choose how you want that info shared.
Posting: Now that you have your page all setup, you can start posting content on it. You can share your images and blog posts just by simply uploading or linking. The only drawback about this is, unlike Facebook, you can not feed an rss feed to your Google+ Page (as of yet). So for now, for every new release or blog post, you will need to go and manually add it to your page.
Promotion: Now that you no longer have a Google Friend Connect widget on your sidebar, you can replace that by creating a widget for your Google+ Page. You can create a similar badge, as the one you see below, in just a few simple steps from the Google Developers website here.
Linden Lab® also has a great presence on Google via their Google+ Page. I did a post recently that contained a list of all the social networks Linden Lab is participating in, check out: SL™ Gets Even More Social.
Finally, don’t forget to Follow and +1 my Google+ Page to interact with me there. I visit it everyday and keep an eye on it. I also have a Google+ Profile which I also use from time to time.
Are you looking for a way to get your SL™ brand more exposure? Social Media is an inexpensive and easy way to get the word out. I will be sharing two tutorials about creating and maintaining Facebook and Google+ pages with very little effort.
Creating a Facebook page for your brand or avatar is the perfect way for you to have a presence on facebook without breaking the Facebook TOS. With so many facebook users, it’s the perfect social network to ease into using and see immediate results from. Just follow these six steps!
Registering: Go to http://facebook.com/pages/create.php and login to your facebook account. If you don’t have one, you will be asked to create one. If you like, you can use your RL account to create it (that’s what I have done) and no one will know that you are the owner of that page. You can keep the administrators of your page private.
Choosing a category: Choose the appropriate topic and category for your brand and/or avatar. For avatars I’ve seen people usually choosing one of these categories “artist” “public figure” and “fictional character” like I have on my page. For Brands I’ve seen people choose “Photo” “Clothing” “Games” however “Product/Service” is usually the most popular. If you’re setting up a page for your blog, there is also a “Personal Website” option as well. Once you choose a category, enter in the name of your avatar, blog or brand.
Editing your page: Once you create your page, you’ll notice an “Admin Panel button” on the top right hand corner of your page. Once clicked, it opens up a top menu right above your page where you can then go into the “Manage” menu and edit your page. In the new window, go through each tab on the left and make sure every section is filled out to your liking. Remember to pay close attention to the “Your Settings tab” and make sure to check your posting preferences so you are posting as your avatar and not with your RL name, if that’s how you created the page. This is important if you wish to keep your RL name private.
Automatic Posting: Now that you have your page all setup, you need to start posting and sharing information about your avatar or brand. The easiest way to do that is, if you already have a blog, flickr or some other sort of rss feed that you can plug into your page using an app like rss graffiti, you can setup the app to automatically share your posts as soon as you publish them on other networks.
Interacting with your followers: As you build up more of a following, this is a great place to interact and/or get feedback from people that appreciate your brand. You can ask them questions or share information.
Promotion: Finally, it’s time for you to start promoting your facebook page. The best way to do that is to tell people about it. If you have an inworld group for your brand, send a notice. If you have a blog or website, post about it and visit the Social Plugins page to create a Like Box (like the one you see below) enabling your visitors to like and start following your page.
Once you’re on facebook, you may be interested in seeing what other SLers are doing on there as well. Here’s another post I did about SL Brands that already have a presence on Facebook via their own Facebook pages.
Linden Lab® also has a great presence on facebook via their Second Life facebook page with over 200,000 followers. They post daily content, ask questions and share images from other SLers. It’s a great community to be a part of.
Finally, don’t forget to like my facebook page and interact with me there. I visit it everyday and keep an eye on it. Thank you to all those that are already following my posts there! <3
Since Kirstens Viewer is no longer available, you guys have been contacting me asking which viewer I’m now using. Therefore I thought I would do a video tutorial of my recent favorite viewer, Exodus Viewer. I’ve been using Exodus consistently since November 10th when I did this plurk about it. I had downloaded it but had some issues getting shadows to run. I found out I wasn’t the only one having this issue. If you read that plurk you’ll see that you just need to disable anti-aliasing and shadows will pop up for you. I’ve gone into a bit more detail about this in the video if you need to see what I mean I am embedding and linking the video below.
One thing I really love about Exodus Viewer is that I can take the biggest snapshot I like (usually 5760×3084) and I will not get any kinds of glitches or weird lines on my image. I have put up a pure raw shot on my flickr here which I’ll also embed a small version of below. As you can see, the image is completely clean and that’s how ALL of my images look whenever I use Exodus Viewer.
Another thing I love about Exodus Viewer is that it actually lets me take pictures without ever crashing using my avatar that is up to about 120K inventory now (I know, I’m bad, shush :P wanna organize it for me? :D)
(Raw shot from SL)
I recently purchased a new video card a few months back so I have updated my computer specifications page with that info. You can take a look to see what kind of computer I have. After getting the new 560ti video card, my crash rate went down significantly. And then after discovering Exodus and using it religiously, I rarely crash, if ever, and usually because I am doing a whole bunch of things at once (such as watching something on netflix, chatting in skype, checking plurk, and shooting massive images in SL, yeah…I know…I’m crazy :P).
The developer of Exodus is having some computer issues so the development has been a bit delayed but hopefully he’ll be back soon adding more updates and features to it. For now, the last version works fantastic for me so hopefully it will be good for you guys too.
So anyhow, I hope you guys like Exodus as much as I do. I have been really happy with it. If you do have any questions, feel free to email me and I’ll do the best I can to help you out.
Today I plan on rambling a little bit (what else is new?) about my reasons for blogging. The reason I blog is because it gives me great pleasure to actually take a picture, play with it in photoshop and have the ability to share it with all of you here with a few words. It gives me a sense of fulfillment and I want to make sure I do it right. I try to be very open and professional about everything I do inworld and on this blog. This includes full disclosure on my photography rates and policies, my advertising rates and policies, my review policy as well as what it is I do and whom I work for inworld, all listed on my about page.
In my Disclosure Policy I’ve stated that I’m not compensated to provide opinion on products, services, websites and various other topics. I also do my best to disclose everything that is given to me and not purchased with my own lindens to abide by the FTC Guidelines listed on my review policy page. When I blog something I do it purely because first: I’ve actually had the time to acquire, try it on, style it and take pictures in it. And second: only because I feel inspired by it, (as I’m sure all fashion bloggers do). However, I do this purely because I eventually have plans to take this blog to another level. It’s already less about fashion and more about my social media presence in which I am hoping to eventually take it to a RL/SL vlog in a few years. Therefore to protect myself, I want to make sure everything I do here is completely transparent and I hope I have been accomplishing that.
All that being said, I’d like to go right into announcing a new partnership I have formed with koinup.com. Koinup is a social network, online community and web portal dedicated to virtual worlds users. It’s a great place to share your photos and videos. The audience will be all virtual world users so, unlike flickr, it’s really targeting users that have the same interests as you. I’ve been sharing my images on koinup for a while now and get a great response and lots of hits to my blog from there. You can check out my koinup profile here.
I’ll be using the koinup places project to take my exploration of SL to another level. So hopefully that will result in a lot more on location shots on my blog in the upcoming months. I hope you take a look at koinup places and explore along with me.
Finally, let’s talk about mesh, shall we? Maitreya has joined the mesh revolution with a bang! This past week three phenomenal mesh items were released. What surprised me the most about all this was, this is was my first time trying on the standard sizing that these items are available in and I turned out to be a small! Totally didn’t expect that especially since my ass seems to have a bad reputation of being on the big side. I swear, I have no idea where that rumor originated from.
Credits:
*Skin: -Glam Affair- Linn Tan – D 01 by Aida Ewing
*Eyes: FASHISM ‘Sunrise’ Eyes – Pale Warm Silver (M) by Ikon Innovia
Hair: [elikatira] Early – Black 06 by Elikapeka Tiramisu
*Dress: Maitreya MESH Nolita Dress * ColorBlock 8 S by Onyx LeShelle
*Boots: Maitreya MESH Radical Boots * Black S by Onyx LeShelle
*Bag: Maitreya MESH Leather Satchel * Black (shoulder) by Onyx LeShelle
*Scarf: !Ohmai for Collabor88 – A Lil’ Foxy (Black Fox) by Anya Ohmai (Available at Collabor88)
Ring: Donna Flora ANEMONE ring by Squinternet Larnia
Nails: Candy Nail #P024 Magic of Witch Black by peche Bury
*Bracelet: Zaara : Prata silver cuff *onyx* by Zaara Kohime
*Poses: aDORKable Poses: Bag Lady by Adorkable Peapod
*Promotional copies
I’ve been getting a lot of emails from people that know nothing about Second Life, but have somehow found my blog through various social networks, asking me for more information. Therefore I figured I would write up a quick tutorial for those interested in joining and looking for some free resources to kick start their inventory.
Getting Started:
Join.SecondLife.com – Sign up to Second Life using one of the creative free avatars available at startup and choosing a unique username for yourself. This is a name that you will be known as inworld, so it’s very important to pick something that does not have a lot of numbers in it and is easy for people to pronounce.
Welcome Island – When you login with your new avatar and username the first time, you will be taken to Welcome Island. Please follow the orientation carefully and familiarize yourself with how to use and move about SL.
Inventory System folders – In your library folder check out “Clothing > Initial Outfits” and you will find a huge collection of different avatars you can change yourself into. This includes the latest non-human avatars.
Appearance Editor – Get yourself familiar with the appearance editor so you can change your shape to your liking.
What’s your Digits? – In April of 2011 I did a post requesting people to share some of their shape numbers and received a great response. You can check out the digits flickr group to get an idea about numbers for your preferred shape. EDIT: Vaki Zenovka took all the numbers people shared and found the average and is now giving away the average sized shapes for free FULL PERM. Read her post about it here.
Freebies for New Residents:
Exodi by Ryker Beck – Three full avatars for girls which include: shape, skin, hair, clothing, shoes and more only for residents younger than 30 days. (pictured here)
Long Awkward Pose by Dove Swanson – Basic AOs for both male and female avatars. Only for residents younger than 30 days. (AO pose pictured here)
elymode by Elysium Eilde – Lots of free clothing samples for girls. Only for residents younger than 30 days.
Another Stupid Shirt Shop by Photos Nikolaidis – Unisex clothing (jeans, tanktops, sweater) eyes and guyliner. Only for residents younger than 30 days.
More Freebies in this plurk I created that plurk so everyone can continue to share stores, slurls and designer’s names that offer free products to Second life residents. Please feel free to add any stores you feel belong on this list or leave them in the comments of this post.
Free Dove by Palomma Casanova – A collection of free clothing for males and females from established designers across the grid.
Freebie Blogs:
Blogs that feature freebies that are available across the grid on a regular basis:
The Circadian – Not a freebie blog, but an event blog that covers daily sales events grid wide.
Fashion Feeds:
Once you are comfortable with yourself inworld and would like to further customize your avatar using high quality items, check out the various fashion feeds that display styling from thousands of SL fashion bloggers. Here are just a few:
The first question people usually ask me is, “Does it cost money to play Second Life?” Honestly, you can get by without spending anything and by picking up free items across the grid. But to really be able to customize your avatar and enjoy it to the fullest, linden dollars can be quite useful. Once you have the means, please remember to give back to the generous content creators that have shared so many wonderful free items with the community.
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