Feb 2, 2007

A Favicon!

I was poking about the intertubes the other day looking for a better home page. About ten years ago Excite was where the cool kids went to see the day's headlines, check stocks, weather and such. I was cool, so that's where I went too. Well it's 2007 and Excite hasn't cut it for a long time. It's too slow to load and covers way too much screen real estate with ads or links to their search engine. And no cool kids go there now.

The two big local ISPs, Rogers Communications and Bell Sympatico, provide a home page that anyone can use and configure. Rogers' portal is Yahoo-based and has too much Flash and too little info. Sympatico is MSN-based (stop right there!) and drips with banner ads. Neither site is very satisfying.

I did find a couple of interesting "independent" portals though. Pageflakes looks neat but doesn't work in my preferred browser, Safari. Netvibes looks interesting too, but doesn't seem as versatile. I'm trying out Netvibes for now. Let me know if you have a recommendation!

In the course of this portal-play I decided that I needed an icon for my blog. These things are called favicons. You've probably noticed lots of web sites will have a custom icon that appears in your favourites or bookmarks. What should I use? I decided to take a slice of my blog banner's graphic of Mars. (What, you thought that was a red Moon? You're crazy.) The process is straight-forward enough. Make a small square image, save it as an Windows ICO file, name it favicon.ico, drop it into the "top" directory of your web site. You can also do somethings in your HTML to make it happen. Done, but it doesn't seem to be visible sometimes. Hmmm.

I got out for a run this afternoon, just 8K in 37 minutes in the cold and snow. No-one along side to push me! Wish I'd remembered my heart rate monitor so I could have compared the effort to last Sunday's run.

Listening to: Intergalactic by Beastie Boys from Hello Nasty.

No comments:

Post a Comment