Tuesday, July 08, 2008

Made the switch and found a GREAT plugin
So I finally made the switch. I am ditching Internet Explorer and switching to Firefox. The browser is much easier to use and more stable. I know I am slow to switch but it is finally time. I hope IE 8 fixes the problems with 7.

In doing the switch using the Google browser bar made life much simpler. I have all of my bookmarks stored in it. Made life much easier.

So I was messing with my blog today and found a great plugin. It is at ScribeFire.com. Makes it so you can post to any or all of your blogs straight from Firefox. You can put YouTube videos, Flickr images and all kinds of good stuff in your posts straight from there. Edit old posts, save as draft all that stuff. Copy content right into your post and do the quick and easy linking to the source.

Want to promote your blog, it does that as well. Pick your Technorati tags, trackback URLs and do all your pinging right from your browser. This is a must have plugin for all you bloggers out there!

One thing I wish they would add is the ability to set a no follow on the links you add in your posts. But check it out.

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posted by Christopher W. Bown at 7/08/2008 09:43:00 PM 0 comments

Monday, July 07, 2008

Websites Considerations
I have been working on a lot of websites lately. Building some new sites and updating some existing. I really haven't build these kind of business to customer oriented sites in a very long time, or dealt with customers like the ones I have in a very long time.

Way back when, when I started in the commercial website business it was hard to convince companies that they needed a website, at times it still is, but for the most part companies have a website or if they don't they know they need one.

Well now with the New Web as I call it, there are new things companies need to consider. I say New Web, not to be confused with Web 2.0, a lot of companies don't know what Web 2.0 is and it scares them. They just got up to speed with Web 1.0, they feel they will have to start over to get a Web 2.0 site. That isn't true, but not the point of this post.

To me the New Web means that your website has to be accessible to a lot of different platforms. With all the smart phones out there now and the ability of those phones to use a wireless network, blue tooth networks and the cell networks to access the internet, your website had better be accessible and usable via these devices. The iPhone and upcoming Google Android Smart Phone OS will make this much more important. If you are investing in a site or re-design of a site right now and it isn't Smart Phone accessible you are wasting your money. More and more people are using the internet via their phone. This is the new internet, better to be a head of the curve that is quickly approaching.

The other thing that drives me crazy about websites is when they don't have what is called a favicon. It is a little icon that shows up next to the web address in the browser bar in most browsers. Internet Explorer SOMETIMES shows these. Firefox always shows them. But in a browser that you can use multiple tabs, it makes it so much easier to find the tab you want when you see the company or sites logo in the tab. As I say this I realize my blog doesn't currently have a favicon. But I will correct this ASAP! But as I finish sites now days, I always make a favicon for the site. Found a great free site that will take an image and create the favicon in the proper format for you. It is www.favicon.cc. Works great! Got to love sites like this. If you don't want to create your own, you can download one from their galary. The code to add this to your site is below. Put this between the head tags for all your pages. Be sure to update the path to your favicon.

<link REL="shortcut icon" HREF="/favicon.ico">

But over all my methods and ideas for a successful site continues to change and hopefully advance. But these are a couple of things to consider with your site. Both of these items can be updated with your current site and should be considered when developing a new website.

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posted by Christopher W. Bown at 7/07/2008 12:20:00 AM 1 comments

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