One of the most frustrating thing back when I was a newbie at building websites was figuring out what that little icon was called next to a website’s URL. This little tidbit of information eluded me for the longest time, but I finally figured it out. Back in the day (wow I sound old!) there weren’t 1,000 tutorials to help with everything like that.

A Favicon is the Small Icon that Shows Up Next to Your Web Address in Your Browser

Favicons (a.k.a. favorites icons) help promote your brand and create an identity for your website. They help when you’ve got multiple tabs open on your browser and you can’t read the entire site title, and they are just great for adding a little something extra to your website’s identity.

How Do You Create a Favicon and What is Favicon.ico?

There are tons of online tools to help you create a favicon. My favorite is Dynamic Drive’s Free Favicon Generator. Here’s what you do to set up your website’s favicon:

1. Go to the Favicon Generator and upload a file from your computer that you want to become your favicon.
2. Press the “Create Icon” button and then the “Download Favicon” button.
3. The favicon will now be saved to your desktop with the filename favicon.ico
4. Using FTP or some other method of transferring files to your website, upload the favicon.ico file to the /public_html/ directory of your website’s server.
5. Check to be sure the file was properly uploaded by visiting in your browser http://www.your-site.com/favicon.ico (of course, your-site.com will be replaced with the name of your actual site name)
6. Finally, edit the main page of your site (the index.html file) and place in the head the following:
   

   <LINK REL=”SHORTCUT ICON” HREF=”favicon.ico”>

Your favicon will now be live. Sometimes it takes a little while to start seeing it, but don’t worry, it’s there!

Do Favicons Work in Subdomains?

They do! All you need to do is follow the steps above for the index.html file located in your subdomains and you’ll have a functional favicon for that subdomain.

I hope this helps some people figure out what to do. I know I would have been really happy to read this a decade ago!

Looks like MySpace wants to go back to its roots and launch another crappy product without style or functionality. The recently launched their MySpace News Beta (of course they had to include the uber-lame BETA tag - more about BETAs in another post), which looks like a really poorly modified Pligg clone. You would think that with all it’s resources, NewsCorp would make sure they had a good product before putting out an ugly piece of junk like this, but nothing seems to surprse me anymore.

The site, steals borrows the now famous Digg voting system and presents blog posts and news stories (I have yet to see anything other than a blog post) for users to read and review. The output is just poorly designed. While I do appreciate the vast number of categories the site offers, and the events options (they aggregate events from Backpage, CitySearch, amongst others) I don’t really see any reason to rate an event that I, nor anyone else has attended. It just makes no sense. I see nothing else about the site that I like.

In addition, when I attempted to include my blog’s feed to the site, it simply timed out. I tried again later with another blog and got the same result. I realize its a “BETA”, but these kinds of problems won’t win the MySpace team any kind of good buzz.

According to Playfuls.com:

The news feature of MySpace is built using Newroo technology, a company they acquired in early 2006 for a rumored $7 million. Newroo never had the chance of displaying the merits of its technology in public because of the acquisition.

I’m not sure, but I think they got ripped off. I’m pretty sure this could be developed for somewhere around $.75 (not a fan, can’t you tell?)

Here are some other links to thoughts about this new site:
- MySpace News Kinda Sucks
- Social Media Now: MySpace News Not Ready for Prime Time
- MySpace added News aggregation
- Will MySpace News Ever Fly? (The Answer May Surprise You)
- After the (brief) Honeymoon: MySpace News Still Sucks
- MySpace News: failure to launch, no one is reading

I just don’t know what companies are thinking these days.

How Chase Bank Has Forgotten About the Customer

I had a call into Chase about an issue with my credit card the other night and couldn’t believe what I heard. My discussion with a customer service representative was not going where I wanted it to, so I asked to talk to a supervisor. I was told that there was no supervisor to talk to, but if I wanted to, I could just give her my number and she’d have someone call me back. I found this to be quite interesting (no supervisor? come on!) and tried to reason with the rep to have someone with any authority get on the phone, but got the same thing . . . nothing.

From there, I went on to tell her that I was a loyal customer for around 13 years and was just not happy with the service I was getting. Want to hear the response?

“If you’re not happy, then I’ll close your account for you right now”

Really?!?

“I just told you I was a loyal customer for 13 years and you’re telling me to close my account if I’m not happy?”

“Yes, sir. Do you want me to close it?”

(I took notes, because I was so surprised by this response)

I don’t know about you, but I don’t think companies are in business to chase away their customers, do you? Somewhat stunned, I got off the phone and waited for morning to call back and talk to a supervisor. When I got on the phone with a supervisor (after telling the customer service rep I was calling about bad service), it happened again! I explained that I was not happy with the service I recevied and was almost instantly told that if I wasn’t happy then she would close my account . . . she almost begged me to do so.

In a daze, I laughed and asked if this was a big joke. It was not. Not only was it surprising in content, but in tone as well; she was simply nasty to me. I was told that the company now had a policy which requires customer service and their supervisors to close someone’s account if they don’t like the service they are getting.

Apparently, Chase has established a policy where they send away people who aren’t happy with their service. There is no attempt to rectify the situation. They just want you, the problem, to get lost.

Why waste their time keeping someone happy? There are plenty of other customers to rip off on both ends of banking (low savings interest rates and high borrowing interest rates).

With this situation in mind, I’m asking you to boycott Chase. It is the customer that comes first, and if they are too lazy to give good service, then they don’t deserve to have any customers, plain and simple.

What Can We Learn From This Situation?

Customer service is Paramount! If you treat your customers like crap, there will be a backlash against you, especially in the days of the internet. If you treat them well, they will tell their friends and you will only see positive results! With so much choice (except when it comes to cable TV & telephone providers), we, the consumer, have the power to not only choose another, better, option, but also to tell the rest of the world of our experiences.

I haven’t shut my computer down in 5 days now because I’ve got too many tabs open on Firefox. In an effort to give my iMac a break, I’m going to just post a few of the many interesting finds that made their way into the 27 tabs I had open across 5 browser windows. Tabs are great in theory, but this constantly happens to me . . . I am yet another victim of “Multi-Browser Tab Syndrome”. Maybe I should start a 5 step program for others like me.

How do you handle the tab obsession?

Here are a few of the useful things I had open: (ahhhh . . . it feels good to begin closing things down!)

• How to Fix Your Rankings in Yahoo and Google by Neil Patel, discusses an extremly interesting idea I never thought of: contacting the search engines to find out why your site is ranking poorly. It is more complicated then that and you should read the article to get the details.

  This is particularly intresting to me because I’ve managed to do quite well in Google, but languish on Yahoo and MSN. Looks like its time for an email!

• Attracting New Visitors By Focusing On Long Tail Search Terms by Mitchell Harper covers how to pick long-tail keywords to focus your posts on in order to get good rankings.
• In another post by Mitchell, we are reminded that Every Blog Should Have An Accompanying Ebook. I haven’t heeded this piece of advice yet, but it is definitely in the works!
• Web Users Don’t Read Online by Randfish of SEOmoz
• 6 Things High Ranking Websites Have That Yours Doesn’t written by Julia Hyde

• Garmin Gps Updater - Not something most of you will care about, but my GPS has 2 year old data and I’m trying to figure out if there is a way to update the firmware . . . I hate entering an address on it that “doesn’t exist” - LAME. When I get back to this link, maybe I’ll figure it all out.

In a guest assignment for Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger, Alister Cameron writes an incredible post detailing how Google Blogsearch ranks your blog posts. Using the Google Blogsearch patent application, Alister reveals some incredible information about the data Google uses to determine the quality of a blog or blog post.

He mentions how it looks like Big Brother, and it really does. It appears as though Google is taking data from not only their search results, but from blogrolls, from the qualit of a site lnking to you, from feed subscriptions on the Google Feed Reader, from chats on GTalk, from emails on Gmail, etc. They then use their fancy algorithms to determine weight and ranking. I’m not sure about you, but it looks to me like we have to worry less about the government spying on us then we do Google. Orwell was somewhat correct, but in the real future, it is big business, not governments that are truly to be feared (thanks Charles).

That said, there is much to learn from examining the article on Problogger, as the insight it provides is invaluable. If you haven’t done so already, be sure to bookmark the site, as it is one of the top blogs out there about the “sport” of blogging.

Maybe it isn’t the first rule, but it is definitely important to remember:

Always Have a Contact Page or Some Other Method for Readers to Reach You!

Now, many of you are going to say how obvious this is, but it is clearly not too obvious. Imagine this - I’ve spent the past day or so trying to reach out to some real estate bloggers to get their feedback on a post I wrote on my real estate investing blog. What I discovered was actually pretty sad. Only somewhere around 1/3 of the blogs I visited on this list of 750 real estate blogs had some means of contacting the blogger. Of the ones who did, only a few had their information front and center, with an email link or phone number. I actually had to jump through hoops to find the contact info of some others.

This is particularly sad because the reason most of these people are blogging is to get business for themselves. How do they expect potential clients to reach them if they don’t have a contact page? You never know who is going to befriend you, and it just a good idea to make yourself available . . .

Without my contact page, I would not be in touch with several entrepreneurs who reached out to me.

Maybe it is not the first rule of blogging, but it an important one . . . if you haven’t done so already, get your contact page/info on your blog ASAP.

Note: This also applies for any other legitimate web-business. A phone number is okay, but an email address is imperative. If you don’t have contact info of some sort on your site, I’m not going to take you seriously, and I’m definitely not going to buy anything from your site.

It happened again . . . I awoke to phone calls and emails this morning alerting me that my websites are not working. I really hate it when my server has issues like that (hate is not a strong enough word to describe how i really feel)! So far, this has happened a few times over the past several months, and we are no closer to finding a solution. I’m at least glad my dedicated host has a means for me to log in and reboot my box through their system . . .

Anyone know a good, honest, competant server admin I could borrow for a bit?

I’m off to problem solve for a while, which means stir around, simply because I don’t have the web-server expertise to go through Web Host Manager (WHM) or cPanel and understand what really happened.

Argh!