Ning.com is becoming quite popular. It seems people still want their own social network and what better place to do it than on Ning.com.  After create their Ning account, they quickly realize that in order to stand out and get going they need customizations and custom development. As a result we do some amount of Ning customization, template design and application development.

Here are three common customization and integration points:

• Template Customization via CSS
  This involves using CSS to create (or recreate) your own look-and-feel and branding on Ning. As far as social networking platform go, Ning is reasonably customizeable CSS and with the help of Firefox addon-on Firebug and EditCSS, the process is generally straight forward.
• Customization and App Development via Javascript
  Ning allows you to add a Javascript footer at the bottom of your page (via Manage -> Analytics) for the purpose of supporting tracking and analyics. A while back we discovered a little trick we like to exploit for clients. Guess what..you can put any old Javascript there. This essentially allows to use Javascript to customize your Ning page. Yes..you can actually remove the Google ads and modify almost anything using some Javascript trickery. Check out a our free test account (shows how you can use Javascript to remove or replace ads). Using this mechanism you can add banners, graphics, iframes and pretty do anything to the page.
• OpenSocial Applications
  Ning supports OpenSocial applications, but unfortunately users can only add them to their My Page. OpenSocial applications cannot be used (at least right now) on the Main or other primary Ning pages.

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