<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/path/to/your/favicon.ico" />

where /path/to/your/favicon.ico is a real set of folders. In many cases you won’t need that part anyway, just the favicon.ico.

The Apple website favicon

It’s a neat idea, that’s supported by all the browsers and goes a little way to making your website look a little more “professional”

There are several sites where you can create your own and even upload your images.

A couple of online generators are:

• Dynamic Drive Favicon generator
• Favicon.cc

The problem with these is that they’re a little hit-and-miss with the resolutuon (that is, they look blocky when you do it).

If you’ve got Photoshop, then you can create better favicons, with a little help from the open source community.

Here’s instructions on how to create favicons in Photoshop, at Photoshop support

Here is where you download and instructions to install the Photoshop ico file format plugin at telegraphics

The story here is ultimately when you’re dealing with graphics, design big, then make it smaller! The higher the DPI (Dots Per Inch) the better!

It’s actually rather simple to get a neat icon for your website to appear on the iPhone, and it looks great for potential customers too!

All you need to do is create an image in your favourite image editing programme, say Photoshop, Gimp, Image editor or whatever you happen to use.

You create it to the following dimensions:

width: 45px

height: 45px

Then you save it as a Portable Network Graphic (PNG) with the following name:

apple-touch-icon.png

Once you’ve done that, upload the file with FTP or any other file transfer programme to the root folder of your website. This will be called something like html or your website name.

And that’s it! When someone chooses to add your website to the home screen (in the Safari browser, click the + and select Add to Home Screen), there will be your neat icon waiting there for them! You don’t have to do anything but create your icon, the iPhone makes the corners curved and gives it the 3d effect!

I’m a hip and with-it computer internet person; running a business that is all about the web, you have to be!

Mailing lists are old favourites on the web and are based on the assumption that people like to receive email messages with information in them, be they specials you’re offering, general information or even changes to your class timetables.

They do work, but the problem is that they need content, and content takes time to write in a single sitting. They’re also dependent upon you being able to schedule things in advance and can sometimes be a little late to market.

That’s why more and more, people online are relying on different means to convey their message quickly and with a minimum of fuss.

These alternate means are broadly described using the buzzword “social networking”.

Social networking is one of the more recent internet buzzwords and is a term used for what people do naturally anyway – talk to one-another.

The difference on the web is only the method. Rather than chatting with a phone call (arguably the first electronic social-networking) people do it with instant messengers, applications like blogger, twitter or other similar applications.

Basically, all “social networking” is about is communicating with other people, either one-on-one or as a group (one to many), but doing it electronically.

The bottom-line here though is that it’s nothing new, and nothing particularly to be confused about. Like I say, we’ve been doing this for a while now, just in different ways.

Instant Messaging

Instant Messengers are the rough equivalent of the phone call just with a keyboard typing the message rather than you saying the words yourself. Sure, you can add people to the conversation, but you can do that with a conference call can’t you? Applications like Microsoft Messenger for PC and Mac, Skype (which also does video calls, which is another subject for another time) and Adium for Mac will handle all manner of different one-to-one systems. Adium for my money is one of the nicer systems for the mac, and can handle any account, from MS Messenger, Google Messenger and others. A beta is out at the moment which handles Twitter (albeit rather oddly, but that’s what you get in beta, almost ready but still incomplete code).

You can read more about the various Instant Messaging here on Wikipedia!

Blogging and Microblogging

Blogging is effectively the diary but put online for all to see (or if you want to be cagey, you can lock things away from prying eyes. Childrens photos are a big candidate for the lock and key because, unfortunately, if you can see a photo, you can download it with a simple right click command).

Blogging has been around since the early days of the net, and some sites are still running.

Effectively blogging gives a voice to your opinions, and they’re being used for many different purposes, including simple venting to information. The movie Julie/Julia started life as a blog, then became a book before hollywood took it on.

Read more about blogging here at Wikipedia

Microblogging is ultimately the same as blogging, but with the restriction of less characters to type. Tools like Twitter have a limit of 140 characters, which has meant people who use it need to get to the point as fast as possible. As a distribution medium for additional information which can be accessed with a click of a hyperlink, it’s quite neat and there are several tools (including tinyurl)which you can use which automatically shorten your addresses – tweetdeck for the mac and Tweetr are but two of such applications, but there’s a bunch of them for all the different microblogging systems out there.

Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn

Large-scale “social networking” systems are available online for whomever wants to use them. They offer a complete ecosystem, effectively a web within a web, where people can search on your name or business, link with your profile and become a “friend”, and exchange information.

Facebook and MySpace are more for personal social networking, while LinkedIn is dedicated to so-called “professional” associations, but there’s no reason why you can’t do both using Facebook. Indeed, Facebook’s user-base is far in excess of LinkedIn and has far more features.

MySpace, even though it is said to have “lost” the Social Networking wars (and I’ll state for the record, that it’s become exceedingly boring to describe everything as a “war”) but is still used almost exclusively for musicians and bands. Arguably, the only reason Facebook won through was because their user interface (what you see on the screen) was less bad than that of MySpace.

Why use them?

The question is, why is using instant messenging, blogging and microblogging a substitute for an email?

Overall, we’re talking about distribution and speed.

With a mailing list, only the people who are members of your list can get the goodies you’re offering. This works for some marketing models, but increasingly (and aligned with the overall open dissemination of information online) are less and less effective to get your message out quickly. The Iranian elections are a perfect example of how fast information can travel with only a 140 character limit.

With some clever and regular posts to your Twitter, Facebook or your blog, you can reach far more people than with a locked-down email message. The web can be used to work for your business, indeed, it’s something overlooked by many people online: the website you have designed can work for you, not just be an online business card.

But there’s a catch: like everything online, you have to make it relevant. Your information needs to speak to your market, and to communicate information that people need to hear. This is what Search Engines use when determining where you appear in their results. It’s all about content. And hiding your content away in a locked-down email message won’t help you reach more people.

For example, the tweets (that’s the term for the messages you send using Twitter) that you’ll find at http://twitter.com/tallpoppy are almost completely dedicated to web and the technologies we’re working with. The personal twitter account is hidden from prying eyes (but as a result of the number of tweets and the subjects I write upon, draw just as many spammers as does the professional account)!

The information we post on the Tall Poppy blogs, found on our site, are dedicated to keeping our visitors up-to-date with web-related information and technology, with the once weekly status report on what we’re doing, just to prove we’re humans and not spambots!

And there’s the point of difference that you should aim at if you choose to take any of these new technologies up: make it human, make it real. By doing that you become your own representative on the web, and people like talking to people; we’re all voyers online and hearing positive stories about businesses doing great work means you’ll start to attract people you’d like to do business with.

100 essential websites

It makes for interesting reading, especially the part how Twitter has effectively steamrolled the opposition and now has become, in my opinion, the tool of choice for citizen-journalists (remember the Iranian elections?), and Google and Microsoft have cottoned-onto this and are now using Tweets in their search results which is a big change.

Here’s an opinion on Twitter and the concept of citizen journalism: rather than hindering and misinforming, slowly it will help journalism as a whole as verifiable stories will be easier to find, and nothing is better than getting information from the people on the ground.

And the more information that comes from those closest to problems that are occurring, the better things could conceivably get. Certainly you have to be cautious with information online, but if enough people speak on the same topic and convey the same information, you’ve got cause for thought and the information to act.

I’ve added a widget there for the Dreamhost Status feed, through Twitter, which gives updates on any issues that may be occurring.

As annoying as website and email issues are, Dreamhost is one of the very few hosting companies who give details and regular updates when they have problems. It’s one of the reasons I’ve been with them for 5 years now and have no plans on going anywhere else!

So if you’ve got any problems, take a look here and hopefully there will be an update. Otherwise, don’t hesitate to call me on 0404 189 774 if it’s an emergency!

The Tech Support Cheat Sheet – be the envy of your colleagues and co-workers and fix your family’s computers using this highly sought-after free guide

You can download it here: Tech Support Cheat Sheet at XKCD.COM

Click to open the Stylish Design eBook page

It’s a really nice solution and looks great! The only thing to remember is to save the file as a different name before you compile it, otherwise you won’t be able to make changes!

We let it go. There simply wasn’t the time to keep the magazine going with our lives the way they were. C’est la vie.

I’ve thought a few times about resurrecting it, but have put it down as something I’d done.

Lately though, the idea is growing legs. They’re mutant legs to be sure, but legs are legs as they say.

So I looked around at getting the domain name again.

Someone had grabbed it. a company that upon enquiry asked for $7,000US for it.

Perhaps I’m naiive (wouldn’t be the first time it had been implied), but I find this kind of attitude to domain names not really what I thought the web was for.

It’s a free and open society, it’s something new, totally new. And commercial interests such as the current owners of the domain are very much old-paradigm, the Rupert Murdoch’s of the world.

And they try to (and often do) get away with vastly appreciated prices like this simply because in the real world they’d be told to stuff it where the sun doesn’t shine. The web — to many people — is a great unknown, somewhere to fear.

I was contacted again by the company and they posited the following reasons why they were happy to charge $7000 for a domain name:

You’re taking your business in the right direction by pursuing a premium domain name that’s short, memorable and descriptive.

You already know that building a strong online identity is critical in today’s market. We hear story after story of successful businesses built on the right domain names. They give our clients the competitive edge they need.

[Your domain] is still available, so don’t settle for just any domain name. Let us help you get the one you want. Call us now at 1-111-111-111 (US),+1-222-333-4444(Worldwide) to make an offer.

I would like to work with you on this, and hope to hear from you.

Best Regards,

My response was “good luck” and I’ve got a domain name that’s close enough for me.

While in a way it’s true that getting short, memorable and descriptive domain names is a good thing, but it’s also true that if you do your SEO and copywriting right, you’ll get visitors anyway. The comparison of people searching on a specific name versus keywords is quite different. If they’re searching on a specific name, then it’s likely they’ve already spoken with you, seen your shop or advertising already. The web works better for you if you do your homework with the content on your site, and research the search terms (keywords) that people are likely to use to find what they’re looking for: your services or products.

An easily remembered domain name only works once they’ve found you and want to visit again. And if you want to spend $7,000US, you’d be better doing it getting the content on your site up-to-scratch. Indeed, you probably won’t have to spend anywhere near that much for your site copy and SEO.