In this video, I’m gonna show you how to install the Meebo Bar to your WordPress blog. Now, first of all, you need to have a Meebo account. Now, you can always connect via Facebook, you can connect via your Yahoo! email or Windows Live, or AIM, but I recommend that you just go ahead and create a Meebo account, anyway. Okay, so I’ve entered my email address, and my full name over here, and I’m going to click on Register.
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In Step 2 of the registration process, you’d be asked to create a Meebo ID and also a password to be able to log in to the site. And then you’ll be asked for some demographic information – are you male or female…okay, put in your age…and then click on Finish.
So once you have registered, you’ll be taken directly to the Meebo website itself where you can add some of your networks, Facebook…for example, Google Talk, MySpace, etc. but you don’t need to add in all the services in order to use the Meebo Bar on your WordPress blog. What you need to do is make sure that you receive the Meebo registration confirmation email in your email account, and verify your account by clicking on the verification email over here.
Once you’ve verified your email address, you need to go to bar.meebo.com, or you can just go to the Meebo website and you can see the Meebo Bar information down here. Click on Learn More. And on this page, you can read a brief overview of the Meebo Bar, and then click on Get It Now. And on the registration page, you can skip the user registration since you have already registered, and just click on ‘Already have a Meebo account?’ Then you can just put in your Meebo ID and your Meebo password here, and agree to the terms of the Meebo Bar, and click on Continue.
In the next step, you’ll be asked for your site name and site URL. So once you’ve entered these two information here, you can just click on Continue. Okay, so now, you have successfully registered for your Meebo Bar. And to install the Meebo Bar, look for the WordPress icon here, and it says, ‘I have a WordPress site that I host myself (not on WordPress.com)’. So yes, important to remember that this will not work if you’re using a WordPress.com free blog. It will only work on self-hosted WordPress sites. So I’m gonna click on that, and basically, you get the instructions here on how to install the Meebo plugin for WordPress.
So I’m just gonna click on Meebo for WordPress…and you can see that now, I’ll be prompted to save the Meebo plugin in a Zip format to my computer. So I’m gonna save it, okay? So once I’ve saved the Zip file itself, I’m going to log into my WordPress blog, the same URL that I registered for the Meebo Bar earlier, and I’m gonna click on Add New Plugins…this time, I’m gonna click on Upload. And then I’m gonna select the Zip file that I downloaded earlier by clicking on Browse. And then I’m gonna click on Install Now.
Okay, so it says that the plugin has been successfully installed and I can activate the plugin by clicking on Activate Plugin. Once the plugin has been activated, to get to the Plugins Settings page, you can click on Settings and you should see the settings page for Meebo Bar. So you can just click on that, and the Settings page is really simple; it contains your Network ID, which you should not change.
So let’s take a look at our blog. Now at the bottom of this window, you can see the Meebo Bar installed. But as you can see, by default, it only has one button, which is Share Page. And if I click on Share Page, you’d see these sharing options as usual, and also on the left-hand corner is another button to start chatting with your friends on Meebo, AIM, Google Talk, etc.
But in the next video, I’m going to show you how to add more custom buttons over here to your Meebo Bar.