You might want to think about adding a better looking Straight Dope logo for use in Facebook links

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1

Not a big deal, but if this might be worth thinking about if the SD powers that be are trying to get more people to recognize the brand.

I occasionally link to various SD discussions via my Facebook account and the only logo that pops up for use to visually ID the link is the blocky yellow and blue Straight Dope Logo at the top left of this page. The already squashed logo font becomes even more squashed as a link icon. Since social media is getting bigger all the time it might be worthwhile to have an alternative SD logo that would be more recognizable and more attractive for the Facebook links. I would think the blocky Straight Dope logo is kind of due for an overhaul anyway.

I’m not an artist, but we have plenty of them here and I’m pretty sure you could get some good submissions if you had a doper SD logo design contest.

2

Thanks for bringing this to our attention.

I doubt the owners would want the logo redesigned (as that is a corporate branding/trademark/copyright issue), but creating a resized version of the current logo for use on a Facebook link might be a good idea. The problem is, Facebook takes images directly from the linked page, which in this case would be the logo image on top of the forum. To change the logo that Facebook displays with the link would require a change to the logo on the top of the forum. I doubt they would want to do this.

Can you think of a workaround, where, for instance, a resized logo image could be hidden on the forum, but show up on the Facebook link (i.e. when you click the next button to choose alternative images from the linked page on Facebook, it shows all available images, one of which would be this resized logo)? If so, I could suggest that as a possible solution to the owners.

-xash
Administrator

3

Here’s what you wanna do. Jerry or whoever has access to the vbulletin admin cpanel will need to make one tiny, very very easy change to the HEADINCLUDE template.

  1. Create the logo that will look good at the smaller size. For this example let’s call it imagename.gif

  2. Upload it to your server.

  3. In your vbulletin cpanel, go to Styles & Templates > Style Manager > All Style Options

  4. In the HEADINCLUDE box, add the following line:

<link rel=“image_src” href=“http://www.straightdope.com/path/to/imagename.gif”>

(Obviously change the href to point to the correct file path and logo name.)

Save and that’s it. Facebook looks for this graphic and will pull it instead of your logo. Voila!

4

Excellent! Thank you.

I’ll see what they have to say about the image resizing.

-xash
Administrator

5

OK, I just did this as well. Let me know how it looks when you share a link on Facebook now.

Facebook has restrictions on the height x width of the logo, and they favor squarer logos to wide and short logos like the SDMB. I had to mess with the aspect ratio to get something acceptable, and settled on 130 pixels (max. allowed) x 50 pixels (min. allowed).

-xash
Administrator

6

Can’t you just use the little square SD icon that appears on the browser tabs (and on bookmarks?). It is small, it is square and it is already official. (I know the silly thing has a name, I just cannot think of it now)

7

You mean the favicon? Hmm. Didn’t consider that. It’s too small to blow up, and even blown up it doesn’t convey as much as the current image does:

ETA: This is vastly better than the utterly skewed logo that FB used to use by default.

8

Pls ignore, just testing something.

9

You can always recreate it if the blowup is too rough. It shouldn’t be more than 3 minutes of cut and paste from the current logo if you choose to go that way.

ETA: And YES! favicon. Getting old, I guess.