Tip: How To Make a Windows Live Tile for your Ning Network

If youve been looking for a simple way to make a Windows 8 Live Tile for your members, today is your lucky day. With Windows 8.1, people can pin your website as a live tile on to their Windows start screen. This is a live tile so it will automatically pull new stories from your site’s RSS feed and may even show them as notifications inside the tile.

Activity feed for 3.0 looks similar to this:

http://YOURNETWORK.ning.com/activity/log/rss

2.0 Ning networks it will be something like this:

http://YOURNETWORK.ning.com /activity/log/list?fmt=rss

Just head over to buildmypinnedsite.com, upload your site’s logo, add your RSS feed URL and it will generate the meta tags that you can put in the HEAD of your website template. You can also see Scott Hanselman’s blog for the more technical details.

After you've uploaded your logo and chosen the size of your tile, it will generate a block of code for you to add to your Custom Code section which looks similar to this:

You'll want to choose the DOWNLOAD option>extract to a folder on your computer > upload the images and replace the 4 URLs in green above with the uploaded image URLS. Done!

Wanna use a different feed than your activity feed? take a look at this tip for finding it..

RSS Tip: How to Find the Perfect Feeds For Your Network

Related Tips for Desktop Gateways

How-to Create A Google Chrome Web App for Your Ning

How To Add Your Chrome Web App to the Web Store

If you need help setting up your network for primetime, give me a shout! Hope this tip helps you all..

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