See the cute little sun shining on my WordPress page address bar above? Or the very familiar ‘g’ on the address bar when you go to any Google page . That’s the Favicon. (So sorry, IE 6 users can’t see it ).And why is that minute design detail necessary. Well, it works more like a brand logo of your website/blog rather than just another design feature. You of course want to project your blog as a brand , a service which is recognisable. Labnol.org has the favicon of ‘D i’ as in Digital Inspiration. Now it is just a piece of little code to be included in your WordPress package and we’ll get to that in a while.
For those who host it on Blogger, by default the Blogger favicon should appear, but then, that can also be done away with. Now back to WordPress. Go to the Theme Editor page in your Admin console. Now if you don’t know how to reach there, once you LOGIN to your WordPress Admin page, click on the Design tab, and then click Theme Editor. GO to the Header php file titled header.php (surpisingly).
Now typically, this is where you include the code for the favicon. First and foremost, upload your desired Icon ( a .ico file) on any image hosting service ( photobucket, flickr..you know the names) or you can host it on your own server where you have hosted your wordpress. This is more advisable so that whenever you change your theme, your favicon would change as well. Anyway, typically, the icon goes in the theme folder itself. Now if it is included within the template folder itself, this is how the code will read.
You have to include this code in the header.php. Almost anywhere, but I prefer to keep the code a bit clean by including below the code for the navbar:- the bar which has the link to the pages. And once you are done with it, click update and voila, your WordPress blog is now Favicon Branded. Flaunt It.
Netiquettes as we call it, is an essential part of our virtual lives-something which we have started to be quite dominantly participating in. As for geeks like me, I have been more inclined towards virtual lives and online social networking because you get to experience comments, suggestions and information which is independent and free of any pressure. So be it social networking sites like Orkut, Facebook and the like, or the zillions of Internet forums out there which span across the usual discussion topics like Technology, Web 2.0, hacks, rumors or simple plain tabloid stuff, to even niche and downright specific topics like Astro Physics or the latest episode of Naruto, all of these are being dicussed among the existent and happening forums all over in all languages imaginable. But something is very common in all these forums. And that is the presence of some malicious entity called the Spammer. He/She has the most annoying and irritating online attitude and if detected by the active members shall be reported to the Admin who then takes corrective measures through warnings or might even ban him. But then, these people do strike back with multiple profiles or gang up with some other offline pals . You surely don’t want to join that league. Like socialising in real life, online communities should have a maintained decorum . No questions that we are given the right to have our freedom of expression, but we also have to understand the responsibility of carrying it. Having said that, here I have put some of the points from the long list of Netiquettes to be followed in an Internet Forum.
1. Simple plain- Ignore douche bags.
There are too many people out there jumping out for attention, raising questions (often controversial and offensive at large). This of course at times, taking advantage of their anonymity that the Internet provides. The best way to deal with them is to give them a thumbs down by just staying away. If no member responds to any of their posts/threads, they’re sure gonna be left all alone in their perfect world and they can have all the fun of their anonymity.
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
As clear as that. If the conversation is getting lengthier by the day, someone in the thread would display Hitler like tendencies. So if you are the one who is invoking Hitler like approaches, you have already lost the whole point of the discussion.
Yes, you read that right. And that is possible. Any type of file, any extension, any number and any size can be secretly embedded in a JPEG image. We’ll show you how. So, how will it be when it is embedded? The image will still exist and will show the properties of the original image file. As in, you’ll be able to view the image as well as view its thumbnail etc. The only difference is in the shell menu , where you’ll be having an extra option to Extract your JPG file which will extract the hidden files in the JPG. Here’s how to do it.
Now, first have your secret files ready. Whatever you want to hide in that one random picture. Select all of them and zip them using a normal archiving software like Winzip, Winrar etc. Once that is done, let’s say the archive file is Secret.rar, and the JPG file is Normal.JPG in which the files are to be hidden. Keep them in a single folder. Now go to the Run prompt (Windows +R) and type cmd to go to the command prompt. Change the directory to go the folder where you have the archive file and the JPG image. (You know how to do that, right?)
So we are here now. Type the following command. Say we are in a folder “2hide” in the C: drive. So the command would be:
e.g. here it would be, C:\2hide> COPY /B Normal.jpg + Secret.rar newNormal.jpg
And press enter. We are done with the command prompt so type exit to say goodbye. Now you can go ahead and delete the original files, except for the newly formed Image. Right click on it , and you’ll now get the option of extracting it. Extract the image to get the hidden files. Of course, you can go to higher levels of hiding by walking the extra mile of compressing over and over again with different extensions and then adding it to the image. Or even, deleting the initial bytes from the header in a Hex editor. But do remember to save the deleted line in a notepad and save it in a safe place.
Sprout is an online content creating tool which enables users to create sophisticated multimedia web content on the fly in a very quick and easy way. It is as easy as probably MS Paint. Just drag and drop. Sprout is for free and the best part is you can just go ahead and create your sprout without signing up for an account. The signing up does come into the picture when you want to save your sprout, publish and manage it. We’ll cover all those steps here in this post. But first, let’s build some demo sprouts and check out how cool they are. Go to the official website here, and click on Get Started. You will get the option of just go ahead and start building your sprout, or sign up for an account. I’ll first create a few sprouts just for the testing purposes.
So, now you’ll be on a page where there are a few templates to choose from. And well, you can choose to start from a blank slate as well. You can preview each template to choose one suitable to your tastes or just go to a blank slate if you experiment with all the options. It is all in flash, so do remember that you would require a Flash plugin to your browser (Flash 9 is recommended on the website). And yes, it supports only IE 7 and above, Firefox 2.0+, Safari 3.x +. Cool, so we have given a title to the project, and it is now at Step -1: Creation of the Project. I have chosen a blank slate and am building a sample sprout for this post titled Techkeyla (surprise!!).First, you can choose a suitable size of the page. The options available are just more than enough and you can choose from standard Youtube video sizes to Adsense head banner sizes to even full pages of 960X800. I have chosen a Youtube video size as I am including it in the post itself. Now you can add some really cool stuff. Right from Google Charts to Videos to Slideshows. And even polls and News Feeds.I’ll add a slideshow and the images that I have used are from my website itself. You can really go nuts with the options that are available, and creating flash based widgets have never been so much fun and easy.
Next up, is step 2: Saving and then Publishing. So, I guess, it’s time to create an account. And now that it is done, I can go ahead and publish my Sprout entitled-Techkeyla . It’s just another flash slideshow, but you all know it is so much more than that. Hope you like the slideshow which is a journey of my past posts in images.
And yes, these Sprouts can be published across many platforms viz. Facebook, Orkut,Bebo, Blogger, MySpace ,you get it. I’m really looking forward to creating some really cool ones . Hope you enjoy sprouting as well.
See the cute little sun shining on my WordPress page address bar above? Or the very familiar ‘g’ on the address bar when you go to any Google page . That’s the Favicon. (So sorry, IE 6 users can’t see it ).And why is that minute design detail necessary. Well, it works more like a brand logo of your website/blog rather than just another design feature. You of course want to project your blog as a brand , a service which is recognisable. Labnol.org has the favicon of ‘D i’ as in Digital Inspiration. Now it is just a piece of little code to be included in your WordPress package and we’ll get to that in a while.
