Applepie

How To: Add a Favorite Icon, favicon, to your Typepad blog

A favicon, short for favorite icon, is a personalize icon that is displayed with the website name/favorite listing. Most professional web sites customize the favicon with their corporate logo. Here is what my News favorite folder looks like -- you can see the personalized corporate logo for each favorite entry.

You can personalize your typepad blog with your very own favicon as well - as I have now done with my applepie blog.

1. First thing is to create a favicon.ico file - a 16x16 pixel file. I used an online website called FavIcon from Pictures to convert a picture to a favicon size and format. Once created, make sure to name the file favicon.ico
3. Next you need to upload your new favicon.ico file to the your blog home folder.

That's it. Most browsers now will find and display the favicon automatically when the site is viewed in that browser.

You may need to clear the cache from your existing browser or to hard refresh the page (CTRL + F5 on Firefox) before your new favicon is displayed.

Cris Pierry

Technorati Tags: blog, favicon, How To, browser

Typepad - time to move blog providers?

For over 2 months now TypePad system uptime has been abysmal. Right now, 11:15 pm PST, on Saturday February 5th, 2006 TypePad is down. In fact even their homepage is down. I can't post a blog entry, I can't configure my blog.

All week, TypePad statistics have been turned off. Give me a break. This is not a free service.

Maybe It is time to move on. I do have a Wordpress invitation, I wonder how difficult it is to migrate systems.

The best part is that if you view the official Six Apart status page, they tell you that their system is fully operational.

Meetings, Demos, Schmoozing

It has been a crazy week so far, average sleep per night - 3h. All in preparation for a big VIP demonstration earlier today, followed by a dinner with 50 of my closest friends from the top 50 enterprises in Europe, all while preparing for the big 3GSM conference in Barcelona on the 13th of February.

In case you haven't run into Guy Kawasaki blog yet, it is a great read, especially for those who present and "evangelize" their own products.

If you are heading over to 3GSM to present, do yourself a favor and read the following blogs from Guy.

The Art of Schmoozing

How to Be a Demo God
How to Kick Butt On a Panel
How to Get a Standing Ovation

Who is Guy Kawasaki?

From Answers.com - "Guy Kawasaki was one of the original Apple Computer employees responsible for marketing of the Macintosh in 1984. He is noted for bringing the concept of evangelism to the high-tech business. Kawasaki was a former Apple Fellow"

An open and free internet

It is so easy to take for granted the freedom we enjoy in the USA, below is a reminder that the internet is not open and free world-wide. 

Some of the sites on my blogroll cannot be freely read around the world.

Wordpress - an invitation

Humm, just got an invitation to try out WordPress.

I have heard a bunch about WordPress before but never really felt like hosting my own server (www.wordpress.org), maybe I should give www.wordpress.com a try and see if there are any obvious benefits from Typepad.



From: "WordPress.com"
Date: September 22, 2005 5:31:41 PM PDT
To: cris
Subject: WordPress.com Golden Ticket

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away you entered your email address on http://wordpress.com/ to get a blog.

We're now inviting small groups to use WordPress.com and your email address was selected today!

Visit this address to get started: <deleted>

While you're on a string of good luck it might be a good day to buy a lottery ticket.

Cheers,

The WordPress.com Team

Applepie - The Day After

I started this blog 32 days ago as part of my Apple Switch Experiment. My experiment is now complete, and this blog's original purpose has been fulfilled.

I am changing my blog now to include a more balanced mix of cycling, photography, and technology entries. I will continue to blog my Mac OS X experience, and I will make careful categorization of all my entries, enabling readers to drill down on the subject that most interests them.

In with the new, and out with the old - let's try some different Typepad design schemas until I can find a more permanent and customizable home for my blog.

Software Review - Typepad blog

My free 30 days trial for Typepad, from Six apart, is coming to an end.  I have 6 days left and I need to decide if I will keep running Macs, if I will keep blogging about it, and if I will continue to use Typepad.

My experience with Typepad has been excellent.  It was very easy to sign up and I had my first blog running almost immediately.  My blogging needs have been pretty basic so far, and I haven't customized my blog design and layout beyond the standard templates offered by Typepad.  Going forward, if this blog will continue, I am going to want to personalize it more, to use a personal web address, a custom layout, etc.  I wonder how flexible Typepad will be in this regard, or if I will have to upgrade to MovableType.

Kudos  

• Easy setup and configuration.

• Service reliability has been flawless.

• Customer support team is excellent.  I typically blog late at night; if I have any questions or concerns, I can file a trouble ticket and I will often have the reply waiting for me early in the morning.

Gripes

• Lack off offline authoring tool.

• Online authorizing tool offers limited support for Safari.

• Support for blog site "pagination" - the ability to display n blogs at a time with the option to going to the next n group of entries.

• Calendar control only takes you to the last entry of the day - with no method for the user to see other entries made on the same day.

• Lack of an integrated search control - the current method to search your blog is through a custom search on Google.  Not an ideal solution.

Conclusion

I would recommend Typepad to anyone who wants to get a taste for blogging.  It is a quick and easy way to get your blog configured and published with the minimal hassle.

As a "reference" site, Applepie users are are going to need to look around the whole weblog site and search through all of its content.  The lack of blog pagination, a working calendar control, and lack of tightly integrated search control means that I will migrate off typepad if I choose to continue writing this blog.  But the great experience with Six appart means that I will probably migrate to Movable Type instead of looking around for other blogging tools such as WordPress.