I read an article awhile ago on the common mistakes that newbie bloggers make.  Most of them I’d already gotten past, but there was one that caught my eye… not creating your own personalized favicon for your blog.  In case you don’t know what a favicon is (I didn’t), it’s the tiny little picture that appears at the top of your web browser page when you’re viewing a particular website.  These have been around for ages, but I didn’t realize that they had their own name. Apparently they do.  Favicon.  (Although I continually type “flavicon” and I don’t know why!)

I knew that one of my blog themes (the Christmas one, I think) had automatically changed the little picture once upon a time, but I did’t realize that I could change it on my own.  Then I read that article and thought “I should do that!”… And I promptly forgot about it until I saw a tweet come out a few days ago that mentioned changing your favicon.

So I started looking into it again.  I found a few websites that told me how to do it.  Choose a picture, run it through a website program that changed it to an .ico file, FTP the new file to my WordPress server, launch the site editor, open the Header.php file, past a link in there with the location of the new .ico file included…  confused yet?  Yeah, then at the end of the article it said “Or you could use a WordPress plug like this…”

Doh!

Why hadn’t they told me that IN THE BEGINNING???

So I did a search for favicon plugins, and lookie there… there are several of them!  I chose one called Favicon Rotator, which is a piece of cake to use!  It takes any picture and turns it into a favicon file and uploads it to where it needs to be. It’s that easy.  Not only that… but you can upload multiple favicons, and it will display them randomly whenever someone goes to the blog.  I like that!

If you have a WordPress blog and are looking to customize it a little bit, I recommend installing a favicon manager.  As I said, there are several to choose from, and you don’t need to use Favicon Rotator.  If you do try it out (or any plugin) let me know how you make out with it!

Yup, I’m going to harp on the wonders of free 0nline storage and automatic backup again.  Since I wrote my first post on Dropbox last week, I’ve had a chance to play with it much more, and I like it even more than when I wrote that post!  It truly is a fantastic utility, and you can’t beat the price… free!

To expand a little more on what I had written earlier, once you  have created your free account on Dropbox.com, you then install the software on your computer (takes about 30 seconds) and voila…  you have an icon on your desktop called My Dropbox, which is a direct link to your free 2 GB of space on the Dropbox servers.  It’s that simple!  I threw a bunch of stuff in there… pictures from my Cape Breton trip, movie clips and mp3s from an online course I’m taking, even my VGA-Planets installation files, so I no longer have to ask my friend to send them to me when I reinstall my computer!  And everything gets backed up in real time, and is accessible from anywhere!  When I was writing a post earlier today on my Cape Breton visit, I didn’t have my laptop with me… normally that would mean that I couldn’t include the pictures that I wanted, but then I remembered that they were stored in my Dropbox, and I can log in with any browser and retrieve them no problem.

My days of emailing files back and forth to myself are over.  My worries about not having a backup of my important files are done.  I wish that I had taken my friend’s advice much earlier, because had I started using Dropbox months ago, I wouldn’t have lost a few family pictures along the way.

A friend of mine told me about Dropbox quite some time ago.  I created an account at the time, but I didn’t actually try it out until today.  What a great little service!

Dropbox provides you with 2GB of free online storage, perfect for backing up important files that you can then access from any computer.  You can also easily share some (or all) of these files with other people, if needed.  It’s a piece of cake to log in and retrieve them.  I stored some mp3 and video files for a course that I’m taking.  I don’t need to worry about accidentally deleting them (again) and can get to them anywhere I have an internet connection.  There’s even a Dropbox app for my iPhone!

While there is an option to pay for more storage, one of the really nice things about Dropbox is that they will give you an additional 250MB of storage for each referral, up to 8GB maximum.  So I’m asking for a little help here.  Sign-up only takes a couple of minutes, and is free.  Plus, it really is a worthwhile service.  Many times I’ve wished that I had easily accessible backups of certain files.  And then there’s the stuff that I’ve lost over the years… sure, you can back things up to a DVD or external drive.  I would never suggest using online storage as your sole method of backup… but keeping everything on local backup isn’t a great idea either.  Things happen.  Trust me.  A good strategy should involve a combination of offline and online backup, especially for those files that you can not replace… ie pictures.

So, please.. if you have a moment, take a look at Dropbox.  And if you think that it might be useful for you, consider signing up.  I just checked their FAQ, and we both get an additional 250MB if you sign up through the referral link.  And remember…  it’s completely free.  And extremely useful!  Thanks!

I received a link to this fun little page a week ago, but only just got around to reading it now.  It’s awesome.  Thank you, Janet.

I’ve referred to myself, in jest, as a bit of a grammar snob.  Usually when people read my writing for the first time, one of the things that I commonly hear is that it’s nice to read something that (generally) uses complete sentences.  That’s not to say that I’m fanatical about it.  I definitely take some liberties with my writing, especially when it comes to the blog.  I don’t believe that there is a style guide out there anywhere that advocates ending sentences with three periods.  Yet it’s not uncommon to see me end mine like this…  Followed by some sentence fragment…

But, despite a few questionable stylistic oddities, I generally try to follow the rules of proper grammar.  Spelling, on the other hand… well… If I don’t run a post through the spell-checker prior to sending it out, chances are that something will be wrong.

So here is list of 10 commonly misspelled words, and some fun and easy ways to remember how to properly spell them.  It didn’t take me long to find my own pet peeve, “then” vs “than”.  For me, that’s a deal-breaker.  When I read something that uses the word “then” when it should be “than” my skin crawls.  I know some very intelligent people who continue to use the wrong word, and I don’t know if they will ever change.

To that point, I’m far from perfect.  I only very recently stopped writing her’s and your’s.  For some reason, I had convinced myself that was the possessive case for her and your.  I still find myself typing those, but usually catch them on my own as I am typing them.  Hers.  Yours.  Hers.  Yours.

One of the other mistakes that I make constantly is the word alot… except that it’s not a word.  I misspell this nearly every time I write it.  Frankly, I think that it should be a word, but who am I to argue with the grammar gods?  Sometimes I go back and fix it, a lot of the time I don’t bother.  Just depends on my mood.

Surprisingly, ofcourse didn’t make the list.  I spell this incorrectly just as often as I spell alot.  Of course.  Of course.  Of course.  No matter how many times I type that, it still doesn’t look as natural to me as ofcourse.

As for the others on the list, most of them are things that I don’t have a problem with.  Except the word definitely.  It’s pretty much a 50-50 toss up whether I spell that definately.  I figured that I was the only one, but apparently it must be more common than I had originally thought.  Definitely.  Definitely.  Definitely.

I’ve never heard of the website, The Oatmeal, but this page that they put up is certainly worth a read.  You might even learn something…

(Ironically, when I ran the post through the spell-checker, I misspelled the word misspell each time!  Ha.)

I wrote about this in Chap 1 of the blog, but I thought that it was time to remind people (and inform new readers) of this wonderful little toolbar from Airmiles.

Airmiles teamed up with Yahoo to create a toolbar that works with Internet Explorer and Firefox.  I’m not sure about Chrome, Opera, or Safari since I don’t use any of those. You need to enter your Airmiles card number when you attemt to download the software.  After that, it installs with your information already loaded. 

The main advantage of this toolbar is that, for every 50 searches you do through Yahoo’s search engine, you will be awarded 5 airmiles, to a maximum of 40 per month.  It’s incredibly easy to accumulate airmiles, even if you’re not sitting there trying to artificially create searches.  Rather than type cnn.com into my address bar, now I type cnn into the Yahoo search box first, then click on cnn.com which will come up as the first choice.  It’s an extra step, but it’s not hard.  Sure, many people are so used to using Google, that the thought of another search engine is foreign to them.  But some of us remember a time before Google was a verb, and Yahoo is still a very competent search engine.  And it’s not like you can’t go to Google.com if you can’t find what you’re looking for.  Pretty unlikely. 

I’ve been using the toolbar faithfully for a few months, and I have yet to max out to 40 airmiles.  I think that the most that I’ve gotten to is 30, and I did a little creative searching on the last day of the month to get me to the next 50 search cutoff.  And hey, I figure that 30 airmiles from something as simple as using a search engine… well, that’s more than I get from shopping at Sobeys and buying my gas from Shell. 

Combined!