WidgetLaboratory

We've been hearing hundreds of success stories from site owners who have migrated their photo content off of Ning using our LAB NINJA Photo Backup and Migration tool.

A few of you with super large networks have reported that your migration is hanging after several hundred or several thousand images.

Here are a couple of tips for anyone who is having trouble:

1) Please take note of the image that is the last one downloaded in your local folder. If you've tried twice to download and it hangs on the same photo, then go into your Ning site and DELETE that image... it has something wrong with its attributes. Then try to download from scratch. Should work;

2) Remember that some of your original photos may be VERY LARGE and thus take a LONG TIME compared with others that are smaller. Ning has a cache system for images that might make it look like it has hung-up, when in fact it's just taking a long time. You may have to leave your machine sitting for some time if you have thousands of images;

3) Make sure you have downloaded and installed the latest version of Flash (version 10).

Try these in this order and you should be fine.

We're always hard at work inventing new widget ideas.

Here's a little preview of our latest...

From Ning: We're working now on figuring out a way to ensure that all content from adult networks is available for export before January 1st. You own it today and we want to get you the ability to easily export it as quickly as possible.

Does anyone really believe that Ning cannot provide you with a migration tool? We were able to create one ourselves in a couple hours, without any internal access to Ning.

What is their excuse again?

There have been a few folks reluctant to make the move to SocialGO during the Beta period because they've not yet seen a large variety of layouts or style examples. While we've covered this topic previously and tried to assure everyone that the drag and drop interface and new template library will elminate this doubt once and for all... it is always good to throw a little tidbit out in the meantime.

CSS has always been the backbone of any good website design. Even with templates, the judicious use of CSS can "transform" a site from "blah" to "wow" with just a few tweaks. As part of our ongoing push to educate and assist those of you making the move to SocialGO, today we want to show you a very slick design that has been created by Ryan from GymHookups.

Ryan has indicated that this is a work in progress, but we were impressed with his clever use of CSS to reverse the position of the right column, provide some breathing room in the central feature area, and give a clean and contemporary feel to the site. There is also a customized navigation menu bar. Ryan has cleverly made good use of the Pages & Tabs function to add advertising in the header, footer, and below the fold areas, in addition to adding a nice Store into a dedicated page.

We'll revisit Ryan's site upon its completion, but in the meantime, here are some screen grabs to stimulate your own creative ideas:

Well, we couldn't sit tight with just having a two-way video chat feature. So, how about three or four (or more?) way conference? Here's a live experiment for you to play with while we continue building our suite of tools for the SocialGO Widget Store.

Just click on the LabConference button on the left column and have a friend or two join in. We're not sure how many people this will support yet... so help up find out?

Remember, this is not a product yet... only for fun. Enjoy!

Two Way Conference

Three Way Conference

For those of you who may have missed it, we've now added a new "twist" to our little experiment. Now we've thrown in the ability to have PRIVATE CHAT as well as public.

The cool thing is that it is still pretty darn zippy... give it a try and play around. All these little test are being done as part of our ongoing development of the final product.

Just Click on Button on Left Column to play around.

This is not a finished product, only a test of the underlying server technology. Have fun playing around... expect it to go away at any time while we work out some things.

While we work with SocialGO on completing the final BETA testing of the platform, the LAB has also been having some fun! We've been playing around with developing some new ideas that "may" someday make it into our products. Here's a take on the "photobooth" concept. Just click, take four pictures, and share your montage... contagious!

Here's a quick and easy way to remove the title from the top of your Network. This is useful if you are using a header image or just don't want a title for any reason.

First, go into your Admin Center using the Launch Admin button on the left side of your site:

Second, go into your Ads & Custom HTML section:

Third, copy and past the following CSS into the Page Meta Data section:

<style>

div#header h1 a {
font-size:0;
}

</style>

Last, hit the Update Button, then return to your network, and you are done. Easy!!