300 Followers!!!

I just want to thank all my followers for their continued support.

Snakes in the Tubes!

Seriously, there are snakes in the tubes!

Samsung Epic First Impression

I got a new phone today, a Samsung Epic.  First thing I did was root it and install custom firmware and so far it's working out great.

Happy Birthday Self

Today is my birthday, so instead of making any kind of meaningful contribution to this blog, I'm just going to post a couple of youtube videos on the subject of birthdays or whatever.

Stumbling in the Right Direction.

This is sort of a follow up or correction to my last post about StumbleUpon.  I'm still new to blogging and while the method i discussed yesterday does work, this way is better.  A couple people asked about other buttons like reddit, and similar services.  This handy trick should cover all services in one fell swoop and hopefully we'll all get even more traffic! 

So apologies to anybody who used yesterdays method, you can leave it there or just go back and remove that line from your code.  Lets get to it.  I haven't even tried this out yet, so I hope things go according to plan, as I know sometimes putting these things in a gadget can reduce functionality.

1.) Log in and go to design then add a gadget:

 2.) Search for: Sociable, click the +

3.) Set options, I recommend vertical to maximize visibility of this gadget, but horizontal looks better IMO.

4. Add it and preview changes, to make sure it works.  If you see this, save changes.

Wow, that's a lot of services for 4 easy steps.  Also I noticed yesterday that if you put the stumbleupon code into it's own gadget element, it will only get people stumbling to your main page.  Not with this gadget!  This gadget lets people stumble to each post that's submitted, as seen here:

That URL is for a post, not the main blog!  So this gadget rocks, and it's easy to add!  Now I just gotta make accounts for some of these services so I can submit my pages and get people "liking" em.  Just made a technorati acct and they want me to put the code: ESWAZ7P9PXFW into a post, so just ignore that. :)

This is probably enough for one post, but you see those reaction buttons at the bottom of my posts now?  If you don't know how to add those, I'll cover that in tomorrow's post if there's any interest in the subject.  I thought they were cool.

Enjoy the extra traffic sources!

Captcha and FavIcons.

Ok, some more random tips for bloggers.  These probably won't be as useful as my last post about add-ons and stuff, just a couple of things that I learned recently that I think helped my site look a little better.  You might know some of this already, or maybe not, but hopefully it'll help somebody.

First things first.  Some of you still have captcha on your comments.  Unless your blog is hugely epic, you really don't need it, you aren't going to get spammed by bots.  Here's how to turn it off.  When you log in, go to Settings, then Comments.

Scroll all the way down, and you should see this.  Make sure it's set to no.

Ok but that's basic, lets get into some cooler stuff.  How about changing the favicon...  A favicon is the icon that shows up in a tab or in a bookmark menu, that makes your site stand out a little bit more than the ones that just have the blogger logo.  Example:

I'll set myself up with a new one and take screenshots of the process, so you can see how it's done.
First you can use any pic you want and generate a FavIcon and animated FavIcon at this helpful site here: http://www.chami.com/html-kit/services/favicon/

Just click Browse and then select a pic as seen below:

Hmm those all look like good choices...so pick one and then click the generate button:

It'll give you 2 icons, one of which is animated!  Click to download.

This will give you a .rar file with the icons in it.   I'm writing this to cater to inexperienced people but its getting long so i'll assume you know how to extract a rar file.  No screenshots for this.  Winrar is free to download, and pretty easy to use.  If you need help with it, let me know in the comments and I got you covered.

Now blogger doesn't support .ico files so you'll need to upload them to a free file hosting service.  There are plenty out there. I'm going to use fileden.com (even though it has some annoying ads) but feel free to do a google search for other ones if you like.  Whatever site you choose create an account(if required) and upload both the animated gif and the icon file that you just created.

Now to add them to your blog.  Log in to blogger and go to the design tab and select edit html:

Press ctrl+F and type in /head.  right above the </head> tag, pase in the following code but change the address to reflect wherever your files are hosted, you can see one of these is for the animated gif, and one is for the standard icon:

<link href='http://www.fileden.com/files/2011/1/30/3070528//favicon.ico' rel='shortcut icon'/>
<link href='http://www.fileden.com/files/2011/1/30/3070528//animated_favicon1.gif' rel='icon'/>

So it should look like this:

Click the 'Preview' button, to make sure you don't receive any errors, and if all goes according to plan, click 'Save Template' and the next time you refresh your page.  You'll have a brand new FavIcon!  Neat huh?

Umm, at the time of this writing file den is having some problems, so even though my screenshots are from there, i actually used mediafire.com and i kind of prefer it, so maybe try that out.  It seemed to work ok for me.

When you finish all this, you should end up with something like: you see in this pic:

I was going to cover adding a paypal donation button as well, but I think this has gotten long enough so I'm going to end it here.  I'll probably do the paypal button for tomorrow's post.  Any feedback would be appreciated.  Am I simplifying things too much and making it too long, do you need any more help or advice on some aspect, was this at all useful or helpful to anybody?  Comments are always appreciated.


EDIT FOR IE9:   the IE9 beta (and likely some other browsers) don't seem to support animated .gif favicons very well if at all.  so point both of the above links to your .ico file to fix this.  I changed mine and they seem to be working better in all browsers, except for some reason in chrome.  IDK what's up with chrome.