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New buildmypinnedsite.com helps you implement IE9 pinning and instrumentation

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Click and drag me to pin this site!buildmypinnedsite.com delivers you tools, content and code guidance to help you with implementing Internet Explorer 9 Site Pinning features. While you can already find quite some information on the matter on MSDN, this site goes an extra step and is totally worth a visit.

What does the site buildmypinnedsite.com provide?

The information is nicely structured in seven steps, going from adding a simple hi-res icon to sharing and promoting it on the IE Gallery.

  1. Create a hi-res favicon: integrating the X-Icon editor HTML5 tool, you can upload a visual and create your own high-res icon on the fly. Source sample code is also provided so you can setup basic pinning using the meta tags or integrating the jQuery Pinify plugin.
  2. Add a Jump List: source code samples in JavaScript or with the jQuery plugin are shown and explained, both for static and dynamic jump lists.
  3. Setup notifications: notifications allow you to use icon overlay to inform the user of an up. I personally use this a lot with social networking sites where I am notified of new messages.
  4. Use thumbnail preview controls: thumbnail controls allow users to do actions on your site through the thumbnail preview. Very useful for controlling the play/pause of a video or music.
  5. Let users discover it: test if the user is browsing your site through a pinned version, if not you have some options to propose pinning to the end user.
  6. Measure your success (see below)
  7. Share and promote: show your site on the IE Gallery. Note that for Belgium we have both Belgium Dutch and Belgium French galleries.

Some new Belgian cases

With the launch of Internet Explorer 9 where we had more than ten Belgian partners and sites implement site pinning. These included HLN.be/7sur7.be, Le Soir, Zita, and many more. In the meantime a few others have joined the club out of which:

De Morgen – www.demorgen.be

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Sport.be

Sport.be implements dynamic jump lists and notification overlay.
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Measure usage statistics

One of the things I like to emphasize when working with partners that implement site pinning is the next step: make sure you measure its success. Otherwise, how are you going to decide for any evolution of the features in the future? For example if you start simple with pinning and some static jum plists, having usage statistics might be able to help you make a business case to go the next level: notifications, dynamic jum plists and so forth. Again for this part of the job, buildmypinnedsite.com has the help: download the white paper to learn more about integrating analytics and instrumentation.
Recommended read: the Engineering IE blog article “BuildMyPinnedSite.com: 50% More Engagement in 15 Minutes or Less through Pinning”.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    May 22, 2011
    Nice article! To developers implementing pinning, please do not write the unnecessary code to HIDE the pinning script from non IE- user agents. There are Chrome (chrome.google.com/.../foekkphhdncclpelbmngokikjnkikpad) and Firefox(?) extensions that can "fake" this pinning behaviour, which obviously won't work if you don't spoof your user-agent to IE9 on some sites!