Using Favicon for your Blog or Website (Part 1)

What is Favicon and how it can help you Blog?

A ‘favicon’ is the little graphic you sometimes see next to a website address in your browser. See example below:

When you have a site to your favorites folder, you will also notice the same little icon graphic displayed next to the bookmark. A favicon graphic can help make your web page stand out amongst all the over bookmarks fighting for attention…plus it also looks cool!

In this post we will discuss the opportunities on how to generate the Favicon, you would be able to use as your trademark later. The following post will present the opportunities of activating it in different blogging platforms (Blogger users should follow a different approach than WordPress users).

So, you would first need to have an icon which you would like to use, bearing the extension .ico format. If you search your hard disk, you might find some icons which are generic. I would suggest that you create one to represent your own unique identity. There is quite a number of free icon editor software which you can download from the net.

Before getting to the point of Favicon generation - conversion to the accepted format and size - you need to have a source image. Note that the image you plan to use should be royalty-free and not copyrighted (meaning, you cannot use Coca-Cola’s corporate logo as you favicon).

There are multiple utilities that will help you in the conversion process. Note that you can create icons in 2 sizes: 16x16 and 32x32. To satisfy the visibility in the bigger set of browsers, I would recommend using a 16x16 icon.

Freeware Favicon Creators

Imagicon is a graphics utility designed to convert multiple image files from BMP, JPG or PNG image formats into any of the following image formats (24-bit):

• Windows or OS/2 Bitmap (BMP)
• Independent JPEG Group (JPG)
• Portable Network Graphics (PNG)
• Windows Icon (ICO)

Software is absolutely free to download and use. Compatible with the following platforms: Windows 98/2000/ME/NT/XP/Vista.


Adsen FavIcon is a simple favion freeware creator that lets people make a fav icon for their website, which shows up in IE`s favorites. It can use either bmp or jpg files, and will convert them to ico format using the size and color quality you choose. Not only can you create fav icons, but it can also be used for creating icons for programs. Adsen FavIcon comes with notes on what settings to use for making fav icons and how to install them.

This software is freeware as well and supports most of the Windows OS platforms: Windows 95/98/2000/ME/NT/XP.

Png2ico - simple PNG to ICO converter with no graphic interface, easy to use. To create favicon.ico that contains your logo in the resolutions 16x16 and 32x32, you should use the following command line: png2ico favicon.ico logo16x16.png logo32x32.png.

Note that this is a console application without GUI. You may run it through console or Start/Run only. Double-clicking on the file will not execute it.

The software is freeware and supports the folloing platforms: Windows, Linux, Unix, GNU, etc.

Online Favicon Generators

If you do not wish to download any software, you may also try creating an icon online. Just enter the keywords “online icon generator” into your Google search bar, and you should be able to find several programs that you can try. These online software sites now make it incredibly easy for anyone to convert normal graphics into favicons. In most cases, you just browse to the file on your PC and click ‘generate icon’. After your favicon is created you can download it on your Hard Drive for future use.
Selected sites that can be used for online favicons and icons generation:

http://www.favicon.co.uk/
http://www.htmlkit.com/services/favicon/
http://www.favicongenerator.com/
http://www.freefavicon.com/
http://www.degraeve.com/favicon/
http://www.favicongenerator.org/
http://www.genfavicon.com/
http://freefavicons.org/

Teach blogging in a different ambience.

My husband thinks in shockingly fresh ways. Some of his suggestions may sound wild and even stupid to others but I have learnt something from him. For example, he suggested I conduct my blogging training sessions in a different atmosphere and settings.

Instead of the banal classroom setting, he wanted me to try out our rather private entertainment room. It has stunningly unique home theater chairs that are arranged not in an orderly setting like you see in every household’s home theater.

The entertainment room is quite large that can accommodate several rows of home theater chairs if arranged traditionally. My husband rebelled at this very idea of seating arrangement arguing that a home theater doesn’t mean it has to look like a theater.

For my next month new training session, I am planning to carry out the new idea of conducting the class in a very coy setting. I hope the trainees will learn blogging quickly.

To insure your car for a low premium..

How do I insure my car for less?

How do I insure my car for low premium?

You see, there is a difference between the two questions above though they might mean the same at a casual glance. If you are unsure, read it again.

Here, I will help you; read my explanation below:

Do you want your car insured for a higher value and still want to pay low premium or you are not bothered about what you can claim when something happens to your car but only want to pay up less towards auto insurance?

Or, may be you can visit 2insure4less.com and read pretty useful auto insurance saving tips and also can get free auto insurance quotes. You can them compare the data and buy the right insurance for your car.

Optimizing Images for Search Engines, Social Media, and your Readers

People do not just search for web pages; they also search for certain images. By optimizing your images, you can enhance the entirely new channel of the visitors to your site. Yes, it is true that the search engines are not smart enough to decrypt an image and tell exactly what it is, like human eye can. But you can assist search engine to figure out what keywords your images are related too. So, we will discuss in the article as how the images can be optimized for the best perception by the Search Engines, Social Media Sites, and People.

Image search, by one definition, is query results, accompanied by thumbnail graphics and supplanted by contextual information, that best match users’ search queries. Such information can be generated and submitted by the image creator, by site owner where the image resides, or by 3rd party reviewers.
Places where image search results appear, and are indexable into general search engines’ contextual results, include:

• Major search engines - either within contextual search results or vertical image search
  
• Photo sharing sites (Flickr, Webshots, PBase, Fotki, ShareAPick)
  
• Social image sharing sites (MySpace, Facebook, Flyxia, YouSayToo)

The panel, consisting of both image search specialists and search engine product managers, concurred that image search is the fastest growing vertical in the search arena today. Statistics from Hitwise show it to achieve 90% growth year after year, with over 360,000,000 searches per month across the top search engines: Google, Yahoo!, Ask, MSN, and AOL. All in the "Big 5" have a search vertical dedicated specifically to image results, with 3 of them (Google, Yahoo!, MSN) integrating images into some contextual search results.

The recommendations for the images optimization in relation to the main optimization focus are as follows.


Optimize your images for search engines:

• Keywords in alt text, text around the image, image name, page title. Give meaningful names to your images. For example, GreenToyotaCamry.jpg is better than image1.jpg. Add long description tags to your images. For example: longdesc=”1998 green Toyota Camry driving down the highway”. In addition to a long description, an alt tag should be used as a short description. For example: alt=”Toyota Camry”
  
• Preferred image formatting for photos is JPG, and for other graphic image types - GIF. Search engines are going to interpret a GIF as a standard graphic image with 256 colors, and JPGs as photos (because photos have millions of colors).
  
• Separate SE accessible image folder.
  
• Image freshness. If you’re targeting high popularity keywords, try experimenting with re-uploading your pix, since image freshness is a contextual clue for the search engines and might affect relevancy.
  
• Enabled image search option at Google webmaster tool.
  
• Reasonable image file size. But note that the bigger images usually have a higher priority than smaller images.
  
• Limited number of images per page.
  
• Popular and reliable photo sharing hosting.

Optimize your images for social media:

• Use really great images to give your readers another reason to spread the word.
  
• Image originality. There is a special advantage to taking original photos. You can brand them with your logo, URL, or trademark.
  
• To get Digg thumbnailed submission stick to jpg format and make sure the images can be resized to 160Ч120 or 160Ч160 pixels (Unless you have an image that can be resized that way Digg will not offer the submitter a thumbnail to go with the post).

Optimize your images for people:

• People pay more attention to a clear image where they can see details (choose high quality images).
  
• Clean and clear faces in an image get more eye fixation. (Don’t use abstract images too often).
  
• Keep them relevant: images are not the first thing a visitor sees on a web page but they can compel him to stay (according to the eye-tracking research web text is prior to images; when looking at a printed article people see images first; with web page they see text first - nevertheless images make the visitor stay and remember the page via relevant associations).

Gender specific:

• Women are better at recognizing facial emotions than men.
  
• Men seem to be more likely than women to first look at faces rather than other parts of a nude body.
  
• Women are more interested in images with more than one person.

Beautiful Pictures

Beautiful Pictures

 

Beautiful Pictures

Sources and Additional Information:
http://www.seosmarty.com/image-seo/
http://www.quicksprout.com/2009/02/02/how-to-optimize-your-blog-for-search-engines/
http://searchenginewatch.com/3624327

Make money from your wordpress blogs.

This is a new earning opportunity using your wordpress based blogs though the actual method is our dear old affiliate marketing.

In this opportunity of making money from blogs, the affiliate merchant is the mighty Amazon. There is a new plugin for wordpress. It is an Amazon products plugin which when installed in your wordpress blog, automatically displays products that are related to the topic of your blog post.

Sounds like contextual advertising-right? But this is not a PPC advertising but PPA advertsing. If someone buys a product from Amazon after clicking on the advertisment alonside your blog post, you earn a commission.

The products are selected automatically by Amazon based on the tags you sue for your blog post. You are allowed to do a little bit of customization too with this plugin.

I am thankful to James who wrote about this in his blog.

The honesty bar at a boutique hotel.

I may have to explain to you what is ‘honesty bar’ but I am sure you know what boutique hotels are and why they are a special kind of luxury hotels.

These so called boutique hotels are luxury hotels that treat their guests like VIPs and extend very personalized service. Boutique hotels are the first to introduce ‘honesty bar’ which means the guest using the honesty bar pays up honestly as there are no barmen in honesty bars.

A senior executive working in Ascend Collection group of boutique hotels wrote to me a couple of months back appreciating one of my blog posts. Only at that time, I first heard about Boutique Hotels that are less advertised and known to a special kind of elite travelers.

Honesty bar-I think that my husband is making a note of this word for obvious reasons.

How to Fix Blogger Errors while Uploading New Templates

When you start your blogging adventure, you are so many things to learn, so at the first steps of your blogging career you just use basic templates available on the Blogger website. As time goes, you realize the limitations of the basic offerings and disadvantage that your site interface looks like thousand other basic blogs. There are some limited opportunities to tweak the HTML code of your template, but do you really want to mess with it? If you are not sure, just search online for “Blogger Free Templates” and you get many offerings to choose from. New template loading is easy and does not require any coding experience. If… everything goes smoothly. But if not, you are trapped. In this post, I will present the approach to resolve the typical templates loading errors to the Blogger interface.

Sample of these BX error codes are:

• bx-bliced
  
• bX-ev85ll
  
• bX-39cc9q
  
• bX-y6cz0v
  
• bX-982020

There are the following steps recommended for the problem resolution:

1. First of all, try to upload your new template in the Layout>Edit HTML section of your dashboard. Not all templates have been affected by this issue, so it is advisable to check before attempting to edit your template manually. If you do receive a bX-error code when trying to upload your template, you should proceed to step 2.
   
2. If your new template is an XML file (with the .xml intension), browse to where this is located on your computer and right click the file. Choose to open with Notepad (or your favorite basic text editor). If your template is contained within a text file (for you to copy and paste into the template editor), simply open this with your text editor.
   
3. Search for every instance of b:widget id= in your template, for example:
   
4. • b:widget id=’Header1’
     
   • b:widget id=’Blog1’
     
   • b:widget id=’Label1’
     
   • b:widget id=’HTML1’

Replace each of these IDs with the next number up. For example, Header1 should become Header2; Blog1 should become Blog2, HTML3 should become HTML4 and so on.

4. Once you have changed each and every instance of widget id to a different number, you should save the template under a slightly different file name (to be aware of your altered file). If this is an XML file, be sure to save with the XML extension.
   
5. Now you have made these changes, attempt to upload your file again in the Layout>Edit HTML section of your Blogger dashboard. Now you should not receive the error code and will be able to upload your template.

Note. If after following these steps you are still unable to upload your revised template, it is worthwhile to close your browser and delete all temporary internet files and cookies. Then restart your browser and try to upload again. Clearing all of these temporary files from your browser will ensure you receive a fresh page when editing your template. The reason why the bx-XXXX error occurs when you upload a template is because the Blogger developers changed the way template editor accepts certain third party code. They have seen a lot of data corruption due to ’bad templates’.

Now, with these advices, I know exactly what to do, when error pops-up. Before, if that happened, I just switched back, choosing the basic template from Blogger database, ensured that the basic template works, and than tried again to load a new template. In most cases, that worked, but sometimes I needed to repeat the procedure twice. Now I can understand, why the problem could be resolved by these actions.

A blog directory for moms.

When I started blogging in 2005, I was ashamed to reveal my age. I didn't expect moms to blog. But, how mistaken I am!

Now, even, I know so many bloggers who are older than I. There are communities for moms in just about every field in the Internet. So, why not a directory for mom bloggers?

Yesterday, I found out The Mom Blogs, a directory of blogs maintained by moms and also a bloggers' forum that is not yet very active.

To add your blog in the directory, you need to register first. Password will be given by them that you can change it anytime. Backlink is required from you in order to get your blog listed in the directory.

The color of the template indicates that the mom blogs is maintained by a woman but when I registered myself with them, I was not asked of my gender.

I submitted one of my blogs and it is awaiting their approval.

Free E-cards System Embedded in your Blog

Competition for the readers’ hearts and minds in the world of blogging is quite severe. Every blog owner asks himself multiple questions on how he can differentiate his site from other and gain competitive advantage over the rivals. There is no single way to become a winner, each one choose the trail that fit the site owner personality, expertise, site character and content.

KangarooCards free services might be a great assistance for some sites to provide additional incentives to their visitors.

At KangarooCards it is possible to add a free e-card design and delivery system to any website. You need to set up your own e-card account at KangarooCards.net, install the provided unique scrip, and your visitors will be able to send e-cards from your website all around the world. Because it is fully customizable you can integrate it perfectly into your website.

Main Features:

• Good integration into your website.
  
• Add your own e-cards.
  
• Add cards from our public e-card database (25000 e-cards).
  
• Services are free of charge. You can use this system on your own website and send as many cards as you like to as many people as you want without any costs at all.

See an example of the KangarooCards system use - make your own sample card.
I created the card through this guest link - click to enlarge:

KangarooCards

Developers website: http://www.kangaroocards.net/

Just born forum for bloggers.

I owe my current knowledge of Internet marketing to hundreds of forums where I used to hand around for hours together daily reading lots of posts and visiting the web sites of every member through their signature.

Here is a very young forum for bloggers-Duoblogger forum.

There are only 29 members in it at present. I feel you can get full exposure to your topics if you do it in a constructive way.

The forum's main topics are:
AdSense
Affiliate programs
CPC
CPM
SEO
Twitter
Internet marketing

Give this forum a plug.

How to earn with every link in your blog?

How can you earn using Twitter?

Do you know that the Alexa rank of Twitter is 308?
Do you know that Twitter has about 80 million plus backlinks?
Do you know that Twitter's Google PR is 8?

Wonder what I am driving at?

If these statistics of a microblogging platform is any indication to what is coming in the near future, you better learn Twitter fully.

Here are some more microblogging platforms for all of us to explore and use.
Plurk.com PR6 Alex rank 6266
Identi.ca PR6 Alexa Rank 56,670 (This is a 'Do Follow' one)
Tumblr.com PR7 Alexa Rank 2491

I had a list of some more microblogs that pass on link juice but i misplaced it? Do anyone of you know about them?

Do you know you can also earn using your twitter profile?

Discover what your readers are interested in with Skribit

Winning blog content is “the must” in order to attract visitors to your blog and create favorable conditions for its monetization. However, getting ideas for your blog articles is not easy. Sometimes, you have a temporary mental block, restricting your ability to deliver interesting and fresh content, your readers are expecting from you. Let your visitors assist you in making your topics choices and decision making. Free service from Skribit will provide technical abilities and user interface for collecting opinions in convenience of your own blog.

You just add a small widget that sticks to your blog sidebar with title “What Topic Do You Want Covered?” And your blog or website visitors can easily type in the topics they want you to blog about and present on your pages.

List of suggested topics is already displayed in the blog sidebar. Here is how Skribit look on a sidebar of a blog - from Problogger Blog (click to enlarge):

Blogging Ideas with Skribit Widget

Paul Stamatiou created the service as a tool to help cure blogger’s block (writer’s block for bloggers) a little over a year ago, and already it boasts more than 4,000 blogs using it and gets about 4 million hits per month. “For me it is a backup plan when I really can’t think of something to write. If I notice something that has received a lot of votes in a very short amount of time, I’ll take that as a note that my readers really want to read about it and I’ll change my plans and blog about it,” Paul said. “Then there are the times that, for a few weeks, I won’t have any clue about what to write, so I’ll just rely on it.”

Besides getting newer topics to blog on, you can also get sense of what your blog visitors expect from you and your blog.

Sign in to the site and start using it in a matter of minutes: Skribit Homepage.

Beg your pardon; I don’t hear you!

When I was handed over this ear piece, I was terribly confused. Why are they giving me a headphone before entering a granite quarry?

My nephew insisted that I accompany him to his work place at least on this special occasion when he took over the complete charge of the quarry.

I declared that I am not in the habit of hearing any music on the move. There was a hearty laugh around me.

I was immediately taken into the cubicle of the quarry’s safety officer where he explained about the ear safety equipment called ear muff that looked like a costly headphone to protect my ears from the explosive noise in the quarry.

Well, I thought, helmet is the only personal safety equipment. As if reading my thoughts, my nephew showed me various other ear muffs, eye protective gears such as eye washes etc.

Oh men, these people are risking their lives!

Where the money is?

Image by coyenator via Flickr

Blogging for money is at present the easiest and most popular way to earn money online. New bloggers enter the blogosphere with the sole intention of making a full time career off blogging.

There are countless guides and tutorials in the blogosphere on how to be a pro-blogger. Even in this blog, I have advertised several guides related to blogging.

About a year ago, I wanted to buy that most talked about and most advertised ebook, "Blogging to the bank". A few reviews here and there were not all the encouraging. But some of my friends here asked me about my opinion which of course I don't have. They are asking me where the money is, in blogosphere.

I seek your feedback on that book or for that matter any other e-book on pro-blogging or anything on blogging for money.

Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents

I am happy to present a blogging tutorial prepared by "Reporters without Borders" in March 2008, giving basic information on how to establish your blog and how to bypass the censorship restrictions in certain countries.

Blog eBook Guide

Publish at Scribd or explore others: eBooks marketing online

This publication is dedicated to all bloggers who operate in the countries, where Freedom of Speech is not considered as a common practice. Being born and raised in the former Soviet Union, I know exactly what that means.
Wish everyone Good Luck! Be smart and strong in your struggle. Truth is sharp weapon, and your governments are afraid that you word will be spread around!

A 'wish' changes nothing. A 'decision' changes everything!

Oh, how I wish I have not created my wish list at buy.com! All those things on my wish list were entered purely on impulse, without a real plan or purpose. May be that is why my wish list kept growing. There was no way to shorten the list by marking off some of the things as ‘bought’.

I think it is not too late to remember this proverb: A 'wish' changes nothing. A 'decision' changes everything!

So, I decided to crop the list down to bare necessities and proceeded to find if there is any special discount sale is announced for them at buy.com where there is always some sort of discount is given to all the products.

Just then, my son peeped in and saw my list that included a stand for my laptop, McAfee virus protection and a cordless bug zapper. He gave me a look as if to ask whether I am sane. I followed his gaze and saw he was looking at the Gordian’s Knot Brainteaser Challenge among other things.

How to check your inbound links?

So, the heat is on; the tension begins for every webmaster and blogger about the impending update of PageRank by Google.

While most people hold their breath, new comers to the Internet will be expectant with joy. I envy them. I too was like them several years ago when I didn't know the implication of the little green band in the Google tool bar.

I hear that Goggle has started the work and we might see the results in about two weeks. But I already read quite a few outbursts about losing the existing PR. Forum members in several blogger forums have reported losing their PR.

Ok, so, how do you check how many backlinks your website has?
Go to Google.com
Type link:yourdomain name. in the search bar.

Example: link:digg.com

You will instantly see how many sites are linking to you.

Who helps to get social security disability insurance?

There is a widespread opinion that social security disability is a stigma; I want to voice my strong protest against this rather biased and uncompassionate view. Man, they know their pain! If you can’t feel it, at least have the courtesy of keeping your mouth shut.

When there are no such laws in my country that protect the physically challenged people, I admire and salute America for their concern for the unfortunates.

But, I am also saddened by the fact that even in the U.S., the process of application and getting the ultimate advantages of social security benefit is long and very taxing to the applicants. At the same time, I am glad that there are professional services like Allsup.com that extend excellent support for the disabled person to receive the benefits they deserve.

Do you know that they have so far helped 110,000 people successfully?

Your personal investment consultant for free.

There are several useful websites dedicated to providing information on investing in precious metals but my favorite is always Monex because of various reasons.

* Over three decade of experience in dealing with gold, silver and platinum

* Consistently providing valuable investment advice

* Spot price movements of precious metals

* Selling finest and investment grade bullion bars

* Giving insights on precious metals market sentiment

* Full Service Coin Trading offers

* Best prices for silver coins

* Offers to store your purchases safely

Time and again, I have grabbed their timely recommendations and profited by trading in gold and silver. Ever since I know them, I invest only in gold and silver and no other forms of investment interested me. I consider them as my personal investment consultant.

Extra income from your blogs.

In spite of the unique rating system introduced by Blog Cytes, there never was a single assignment from them so far. I think I wrote about them almost six months ago.

Till date, I am yet to know of a blogger that is earning from Blog Cytes. But I do accept the fact that I know only a small circle bloggers and there may be bloggers who are earning through Blog Cytes.

For those new comers to this blog, I used to dig my past posts and write about them once in way. I think I wrote about Blog Cytes long back-may be six months before.

Blog Cytes is one of those web sites that pay you to blog for their clients and they pay through Paypal. You are given the liberty to reject a given blogging assignment based on your interest and policy.

Try them today.

Blogger Help Video Tutorials on YouTube

If you are a Blogger user, as I am, you probably once a while visit Blogger’s Help Center to find some new tips and answers to your technical questions. Blogger specialists decided to go “with the flow” and help those users who prefer visual presentation to the written description. Google Blogger has setup a YouTube channel specifically to show users step by step how to use Blogger features. The channel lacks a big variety of the offered video tutorials. At the moment, there are just 9 clips available. Blogger experts claim that more videos will be added in the coming months so hopefully the inventory of tutorials will increase rapidly.

For your convenience, I am bringing to your attention several of the proposed clips:

Creating Blog on Blogger Platform

___________________________________________________________________

Creating Mobile Blog on Blogger Platform
___________________________________________________________________

Adding new Google Gadget to Blogger Blog
___________________________________________________________________

Creating Podcast on Blogger Blog Platform

Four job openings for bloggers.

It seems there is a sudden demand is on for bloggers in four diverse topics.
Travel
Business and Technology
Android
Home interior.

Well, three of the above seems to be easy and hundreds of bloggers can apply for them but what is Android? I think it has something to do with mobile phone technology.

For the travel bloggers who are interested to apply for the job, it is required that they should be at ease with wordpress blogging platform and should know a lot about air ticketing industry. The hirer is Flyhub Inc.

Home interior bloggers should have a blog of their own in the topic and are required write two posts per week. It is better you go to the original source to find the complete details about this pro blogging opportunities.