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.