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HOWTO: create a favicon.ico on Mac OS X

24th May 2005, 11:07 am

what with all this nice new traffic to my site thanks to the Make: blog, I figured it was high time to do a favicon.ico file for my site. On the mac, this is a snap, thanks to Takeshi Ogihara’s IcoMaker. Head over to his page (assuming it’s a he), and look for the link at the bottom of the page, something like: “IcoMaker Distribution Package, 84KB”. Download it and unpack it.

Grab whatever image you want to use for your favicon.ico file, open it in photoshop, the gimp, or whatever you have (uh… iphoto may work too?).

Reduce the imagesize to 16 pixels by 16 pixels and Save a copy.

(optional: Undo the downsizing, and re-resize the image down to 32 x 32 pixels, and save another copy. Undo the resizing again and re-re-resize the image down to 48×48, and save a third copy)

Open up Takeshi’s excellent program and select “File -> new document”. A small multi-paned window will appear with six small windows.

select “File -> Include Image…” and navigate to where your copy (or copies) are. Choose the 16 x 16 pixel copy. A dialog box will appear giving you the option to reduce the colors down to 16 colors (or just hit “ok” to leave it in as many colors as your image was in, up to 256). Depending on what you chose to do, one of the six small windows will now be populated with your image.

repeat as necessary for the other open slots, depending on how thorough you want your favicon file to be. (I just did the 16×16 @ 16 colors window, and the 32×32 @ 256 colors window.. should be good enough, I figure)

Save the file as “favicon.ico” and drop it in an accessible place for your webserver, most probably at the root level of your webserver’s documents directory. (on the Mac OS X and OS X Server, using stock Apache 1.3, it will be: /Library/Webserver/Documents/ … on apache 2.x, I believe it would be /Library/apache2/htdocs/ … If you’ve come this far, it’s probably time for you to learn where the root documents directory is on your webserver.

the last step is to put the following code in your <head> tag of your web page:
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />
<link rel="icon" href="/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon">
that’s it, folks! :)

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Category: apple, cool, design, publications, tools  |  16 Comments

technorati works

9th May 2005, 04:54 pm

Wow, I was *this* close to unsubscribing to my self-search on technorati when up pops this post from Steven Knoerr:

http://accessexcellence.blogspot.com/2005/05/bloggers-corner-deeje-cooley-and-steve.html

nice!

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Category: ideas, publications, tools  |  2 Comments

charge for Wordpress Multi User

5th May 2005, 03:11 pm

If I was going to give the wordpress team any advice, like they want it, it would be a few things:

* Roll in the Multi-blog code. I know I’ve just turned your attention off.

* Take a cue from MySQL and dual-license wordpress. Commercial / non-commercial. I don’t know what the difference would be other than a karmic one. I regularly register and pay for shareware. I’m not alone in the world. People will register.

* Take a cue from Apple’s server software pricing and have two tiers of commercial license: 1-10 for cheap, 11-unlimited for (cheap * 2). If the MU code were rolled in, we’d probably pop for a $500 unlimited license at work… probably.

Right now I have half a dozen people starting blogs at work. There’s another half a dozen that are starting up that I’m not even responsible for. That’s 12 installs, 12 databases, 12 headaches when anything changes. We’d pay for that manageability of a unified code base. The problem here is that blogs are turning into the new email list, only tons better. We can talk to our customers better and we can communicate internally better with blogs than we can with email lists. Blogs are increasingly like the fax, cell phone, and computer… essential business tools. Your solution would be the end-all solution with multi-blog support at the main development level. Donncha has carried the ball a long way, so I understand the complexities of charging for service on projects that were previously free… everyone wants to get a piece of the pie, I’m sure… rightly so in some cases.

The differentiation that wordpress has over the other major players are:
* written in PHP (versus java, perl, web objects) so the syntax is reasonable enough to modify without too much hassle.
* server on your own server (versus blogger, et al)
* smart extensible structure. Just look at the number of plugins to validate that.
* easy install. REALLY easy.
* flexible content display architecture, just look at the number of themes to validate that.
* easy to use
* easy to maintain (a reasonable number of installs, anyway)
* xmlrpc in and out without too many problems
* blog by mail (with photo support with a drop-in code replacement)
* satisfying DIY feelings abounding everywhere. DIY is the new black.

I just wish MU support were there in the famous 2 minute install. We’d probably be willing to pay for it. With a dual license structure, single users still get it for free, and you get what you deserve from your corporate users and service providers. Price it reasonably, and you’d be able to do business with small teams like mine, and larger companies like mine if/when they adopted a pro-blogging policy.

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Comic Life, make your own comics

15th April 2005, 05:07 pm

Comic Life, make your own comics: “comic.jpgComic Life from Plasq might just be the coolest Mac applications that made me go ‘no way!’ since Delicious Library. In MAKE we feature comics from Howtoons.org and I love the idea of using an photos I have around here to my own comics. Here’s the first one I made called ‘IT CAME FROM MAKE’ (click here to view). It’s a one page comic with stuff I posted to my photo site. Speaking of– on a MAKE-mash up note, wouldn’t it be cool if this app ’slurped’ in your Flickr photos so you could make (and share) comics from all your Flickr photos? Might make a cool web app.”

(Via MAKE: Blog.)

These are the Musolomo guys! This app is insane! With a 30 day trial!

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Category: design, humor, ideas, publications  |  Comment

podcasting in wordpress

7th April 2005, 02:42 pm

Holy crap that’s easy.

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FPDI

5th April 2005, 10:16 am

FPDI is t3h l33333t!!1!1! :D:D:D

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TIME.com gets it wrong as well

4th April 2005, 02:57 pm

TIME.com gets it wrong as well: “

TIME runs a story on new iPod killers - but their story shows that complete lack of research happens in traditional media as well as in blogs - just look at the following L

TIME.com: Attack of the Anti-iPods — Apr. 11, 2005:

What about iPod’s notorious lack of endurance between recharges, the sealed case that means you may have to scrap the thing if the internal battery dies, and the proprietary digital-music format that joins you at the hip to Apple’s iTunes online store?

How wrong can you be?

- Battery life on my iPods - 5 hours or so. Maybe some of the others are better, but then again my iPod is extremely easy to recharge.

- Scrap the thing if the battery dies??? Hey - even Apple offers new batteries, and if you go to Amazon they sell batteries!

- Joins you to the hip with Apple’s online store???? - I have never bought a song there, and I have still managed to fill my iPod.

TIME - your journalists disappoint me. Employ someone who do their fact checking.

”

(Via Tor’s weblog.)

Boy oh, man, did you ever hit the nail on the head. This is the reason why blogs will overtake the world… Why give your money to a traditional media publication when the quality of the work is this bad? If you want badly fact checked stories, you can get them all online..for free, got it?

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Category: culture, publications  |  3 Comments

project status tools

29th March 2005, 01:21 pm

I’d like to be able to update my project status for small projects and large ongoing projects with one publishing platform, and have RSS and XMLRPC so I can edit with marsedit, subscribe with NNW, et cetera…

On the Mac, ahem.

Ideally I could have a wiki page for longer term static content on the top half of a page and then an blog/XMLRPC component that would let me post updates as a changelog kind of scenario. Right now I’m running a wordpress-mediawiki combo, and I’m trying to resolve what the best workflow is… which information goes on which platform.

I just wish you could subscribe to a mediawiki page easily.. maybe I missed it, but it wasn’t glaringly easy to find. On phpWiki, when it was working correctly, there was a feed for each page, then i think it moved to the “changes to this page” page. Not very intuitive for someone who just wants to keep track of changes to a project.

Wordpress has a “pages” component now, which are like blog entries but are off the chronology of the regular blog posts. They have special URL names, so they live within the stylings of your blog, and can be edited by the blog website behind the login. The downside here is that you lose the wikiness of it not being a wiki. Yes, you get access control, but you also lose a lot of the instantaneous feel of a wiki. Also, how does this work with Marsedit? Do they even show up? If they do, do they fall off after a certain amount of time? I really really like this idea of pages living inside of my blog. It solves a lot of problems, but, I think you’re going to have to pry marsedit from my cold, dead fingers. Do I have to lobby Ranchero to consider a special case for these kinds of content pages for wordpress? Does XMLRPC even know wtf to do with these kinds of “pages” within wordpress?

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Category: ideas, publications, tools  |  1 Comment

DIY teleprompter text reverserator

28th March 2005, 06:16 pm

Ok, no more theorizing, here’s The teleprompter text reverserator, version 1. Please download it and run it on your own box. It will run a bajillion times faster on your machine than it does running on my poor old slow g4 server at home. Thanks for all the help and inspiration… :)

Update: Phillip Torrone of MAKEblog posted about one of the teleprompter projects…

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cheap diy teleprompter - hack a day - www.hackaday.com

25th March 2005, 12:35 pm

cheap diy teleprompter - hack a day - www.hackaday.com: “”

(Via hackaday.)

Holy crap that’s badass. Wait, didn’t I see some functions in php that will reverse a string? ok, couple that with Font Forge, and do a one-time select-all;flip horizontally;save as “backward courier” or whatever… then throw your text into a form, have PHP perform the string manipulation and output a series of graphics using the backwards font, right justified…. ah, man.. that would eliminate the need for special software to capture screens. I wonder if there’s a javascript snippet out there to scroll a page at a measured pace? Probably. Bing! I was also wondering if it would be possible to use a treo as the output screen. it’s certainly a smaller size; it would eliminate the need to place a rig on top of a laptop screen. Save that for stage 2. :)

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Category: ideas, publications, tools  |  1 Comment

podcasting: Sparks! for Mac OS X

24th March 2005, 02:47 pm

Pod on: “

This one is for Steve… The Doc Searls Weblog reports:

Pod on

I see by changes at the BlogMatrix site that OS X (April 05, it says) and Linux versions appear to be in the works. Thanks to CubicGarden for the pointer.

”

(Via musings.)

Irony: no rss feed for that product page. :) But, thank you! I’ll pass this along to the correct party.

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temporary solution to “rss subscribe to one post”

18th March 2005, 04:47 pm

stevecooley on “rss subscribe to one page or post”: “

after comments link in my theme:

<a href='/blog/rss_per_article.php?url=<?php urlencode(the_permalink()); ?>' rel='bookmark'>subscribe to this article</a> -

and then here’s my duct-tape-and-popsicle-stick solution, rss_per_article.php:


<?php

// configuration start

$url = $_GET['url'];
$title=’rename me in net news wire’;

// configuration stop

// <<<heredoc_is_useful

echo <<<xml
<?xml version=’1.0′ encoding=’utf-8′?>
<!– generator=’scrape-a-page/1.0′ –>
<rss version=’2.0′
xmlns:content=’http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/’
xmlns:wfw=’http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/’
>

<channel>
<title>$title</title>
<link>$url</link>
<description>$title</description>
<copyright>No Copyright</copyright>
<pubDate>Tue, 15 Feb 2005 20:52:38 +0000</pubDate>
<generator>scrape-a-page</generator>

<item>
<title>$title</title>
<link>$url</link>
<comments>$url</comments>
<pubDate>Tue, 15 Feb 2005 19:15:27 +0000</pubDate>
me

<category>scraping pages is fun</category> <guid>$url</guid>
<description>$title</description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[
xml;

// heredoc_is_useful;
// seriously.

// scraaaape!
include($url);

echo <<<xml2

]]></content:encoded>
<wfw:commentRSS>$url</wfw:commentRSS>
</item>

</channel>
</rss>
xml2;
?>

”

(Via WordPress Support Thread: rss subscribe to one page or post.)

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Category: ideas, publications, tools  |  Comment

stevecooley on “rss subscribe to one page or post”

18th March 2005, 02:28 pm

stevecooley on “rss subscribe to one page or post”: “

I just figured out that I can embed statistics dashboards into WP posts using PHPExec and EZStatic. This is great because I can point my internal clients to pages on my blog. When they want to see stats updates for their data, they can just go to a url on my work blog.

Now what would be super-l33t would be the ability to subscribe to single posts or pages so that when I pull the feed in my aggregator, the pie charts are all updated. The problem is that yes, I can do this, but eventually my posts will fall off the end of the feed.

Anyone got any ideas for a ‘rss subscribe to this post’ kind of function? Or how about ‘rss subscribe to this category’ ? then I can make a separate category for the programs I do stats for, and let my clients subscribe to their program category in their aggregator.

“

(Via WordPress Support Thread: rss subscribe to one page or post.)

then

stevecooley on “rss subscribe to one page or post”

Bahaha.. below: “RSS feed for this thread” .. Yeah! like that!

[WordPress Support Thread: rss subscribe to one page or post]

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Category: programming, publications, tools  |  Comment

WWDC 2005 Weblogger Dinner

16th March 2005, 06:06 pm

WWDC 2005 Weblogger Dinner: “Sci-Fi Hi-Fi:: ‘Please RSVP to Buzz if you plan to come!’ The dinner will be at The Thirsty Bear this year.”

(Via Ranchero.)

Assuming I can swing being at the show, I will be at this dinner. Most likely.

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Category: publications  |  Comment

LOTR PWNZ

8th December 2004, 11:11 am

LOTR, Instant Messenger-l33t-style

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Category: Film / movies, geek, publications  |  Comment
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