Techie Tutorial

A long long time ago (I can still remember...) (j/k) I changed the favicon (aka favorites icon ... aka the little picture in the address bar) of my site to match the bird that used to live in the header.

Then Blogger changed their whole site building scheme and although I love some of the new stuff I didn't love that I lost my favicon. It took a LOT of time and effort and googling to get it done the first time. I put off doing it again because, simply, I lacked the motivation to deal with it!

Today, my motivation to fold laundry and clean out closets was ... um... nonexistent so I decided I'd tackle the favicon issues instead.

Lo and behold, someone smarter and savvier than me wrote a fantastic tutorial.

Be still my heart.

So, in a nut shell, Bob at Bob Knows the .Net sends you to Dynamic Drive a fancy .ico generator that takes the hassle out of creating your own 16 x 16 pixel icon. Follow Part One in his tutorial for creating the icon. I used the heart out of my header.

I had a little trouble with his Part Two. Blogger doesn't like .ico files and wouldn't allow me to upload it to the post, as he suggests here.

Enter http://www.webs.com/ . Amanda at Kevin and Amanda suggests using Webs to host the files to make your post titles a custom font. Since Webs lets you upload whatever, I hosted my .ico file there.

(Create an account - the free one! - and in the file manager, upload your .ico file that you created at   Dynamic Drive. Click on the file and it will open a new window. The address in the address bar is the location of your favicon and what you will copy and paste into Bob's code.)

Bob's Part Three is easy as pie. Go to your HTML editor and use CTRL + F to pull of a search box. Search for < / head > (no spaces). Copy and paste Bob's code into your HTML above /head.

Lastly, c & p the address of your favicon's location where he tells you to (three times!).

It can take IE  up to several days to update and show your favicon and sometimes it won't show up at all. Yay technology!

I love the little extra something it adds to my blog - it's like a monogram on a man's cuff. It just says "MINE!!!".

Enjoy!

New toy!

One of the best parts about reading so many blogs are the cool resources and sites and people that I can get "connected" with. Totally six degrees of separation!

This one is from JSP, the CIT on my campus. Tagxedo (tag-seed-oh - like tuxedo) is a word cloud generator. Check it out!

These are words from CasaG. I'm not sure how it decides which words to use, but I can't wait to see what other applications I can think of. The brain juices are flowing!

Super Simple "Grab A Button"

I've searched high and low to find easy to use "Grab a button" code and although, it SEEMS simple something always seems to go wrong - the code breaks, my button shows but not my code, my code shows but my box won't scroll... something!

I'm exceedingly thrilled to share a site I found that does the work for you!

Grab My Button Code Generator is literally a fill in the blank form that spits out your code. Then just copy the code and paste it into an HTML widget in your side bar.

Backing up a step... Do you have a "button"? My favorite place to create buttons is Picnik.

1. Upload a picture or an element from your blog to Picnik. I used the damask for the graphic element in mine.
2a. Crop your image to 150 x 150 pixels (a good standard size that fits in most sidebars). OR
2b. If your image is already "button sized" don't crop at all!
3.  Add text, a border, change to colors, add some flair...
4. When you've got it all just right, click "Save & Share" and choose Picasa, Flickr or Photobucket. Any of these will give your picture a place to "live" so that you can copy its address for the code generator!

Clear as mud? Great!

Happy buttoning!