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So you’ve heard all the rage with Facebook, and how it connects people together. So that longtime romance that you lost and high school or college friends that you wish you could see again are easily findable throught the complex algorithms available at Facebook.com.

You’ve signed up and entered in all your info and got your proflie all set up, so what now?

First, you need to understand the user interface at Facebook which has recently gotten alot of feedback and outrage over the new profile design. I personally like it alot and don’t see what all the fuss is about. Historically people don’t like change.

Front and center after logging in is your Home page which has plenty of info to digest but most importantly is the Newsfeed. The Newsfeed has revolutionized the way information is exchanged between friends on Facebook and combines each user’s friends’ Mini Feeds into one unified stream of “recent news”.

Tidibit: Get yourself 20-30 friends through joining groups that have the same interests as you do, then your Newsfeed will start to come alive.

APPLICATIONS - Extend the functionality and reach of your Facebook profile.

Some really popular “apps” are Super Wall, or iLike that you can add to your profile to make it more interactive and entertaining.

• Super Wall is the best way to share photos, videos, graffiti, and more with friends!
• iLike lets you add music and videos to your profile, dedicate songs to your friends, and see who’s going to what concerts.

PERSONAL INFO - Enter your Contact Info, Activities, Favorite Music, Books, Quotes, etc.

Let people know your interests and if they read the same book or like the same favorite music artist these people are likely to “friend” you, just be yourself- people like to see others be geniunely social.

WORK INFO - Enter your company info, city, state, and your position in the company. This allows current and past coworkers to find you on Facebook.

So this should be enough to get you started on creating and setting up a Facebook profile for your personal use and some pointers to get you a socially connected presence established on the largest social utility in the world.

I’m sure everyone that has been using the internet for a couple of years remembers the Hot or Not sites where you could vote on pictures of people and rate them from a 1 (Not) to 10 (Hot!). In my opinion these sites were the start of social media voting. Based on existing votes for a picture, peers were essentially able to influence the outcome of a picture’s status and also influence future voters.

Well in my search preparing to setup a “Hot or Not” clone site, I went on a furious search in hopes of finding a pre-packaged script to use for simplicity and ease. Let me tell you how hard it is in finding a “classic” script, let alone finding one that actually works! I Googled and Googled and eventually found 4 “Hot or Not” php scripts. The first script I found was a free one and man was I elated that it was free. Sweet- no money out of pocket! Well, I soon found out as the old mantra says- “You get what you pay for”- and this situation is no different. So I’m all gung-ho about getting the site installed and ready to go, and once installed I find that I’m not able to login to the script to do the initial setup and configuration. Long story short this script was a complete waste of time.

Next up on the docket was a paid script that I found. This particular script presented more problems than it fixed and I ultimately chalked it up as complete garbage. So I began to do some thinking (they say it’s great for you!) and after only about a hour of thinking I thought about my favorite CMS, and I mean favorite. Almost all of my personal sites are built upon this fantastic system and I kept asking myself why didn’t I think of this before?! It would have saved me about 10 days of wasting time and effort trying to get flawed scripts to work.

Things You’ll Need:

1. A wordpress install (go for the latest version of self-hosted Wordpress.)

2. Yet-Another-Photoblog a.k.a YAPB (The plugin that makes it all happen.)

3. A YAPB photographers theme (This gives you the main display of the site.)

4. A rating plugin (Obviously- what else would you need in order to rate something?)

Ok so we have all our ingredients to get us going, let’s mix them all up and see what we get.

Step 1: You need to install Wordpress on your hosting account and get that up and running first. Sorry but I can’t show you how to install WP  -click here if you need help - because frankly if I have to then you’ll be lost when we start modifying the php source code to get the exact look and feel we’re going for. You don’t want to be lost!

Step 2: This baby here is the backbone or foundation of the entire shebang and this plugin enables Wordpress to be able to act as something it was not intentionally designed to do.

Step 3: A theme that is especially suited for YAPB, there are currently 4 themes that are made just for our YAPB and you’ll need to pick one or all of them- it’s strictly up to you.

Step 4: I used the WP-Ratings plugin in order to get the rating functionality to work the way I wanted it to. You are more than welcome to use another rating plugin that is offered, I just found that the WP-Rating had the most customization options available when it came to either picking a star or bars for my voting images.

Now that you have all the essentials installed and configured it’s time to do a little modifying. I will talk about modifying the Monolit theme I used for the site DoIneedanosejob.com. I can’t say that the mods will work with every theme so you’ll have to play around with the theme you choose.

For my particular theme all changes and modifications were through the Monolit theme CSS, and PHP files.

So hopefully this quick guide can help someone who is looking to implement a “Hot or Not” clone easily, effortlessly, and without all the headaches I had when trying to do the same exact thing!

Who knows, you may be able to create the next generation “Hot or Not” site all on the mighty Wordpress. Good luck!