After building a new web site, one of the last things web developers do is polish it off by adding a favicon, which is that little graphic that appears next to bookmarks, in the address bar, and on tabs in all of the major browsers. It helps to reinforce the brand, allows your pages to be distinguished from others in your visitors browser.
There are lots of ways to go about creating them, but my favorite is with a little command line utility called png2ico. This app has no gui, but its singular purpose is to eat PNGs and spit out ICO files, which makes it perfect for making favicons.
Continue reading ‘Easily create favicon.ico files from PNG graphics’
I use iStatsMenu to keep an eye on my RAM and CPU usage on my Mac Book Pro (which is no slouch with a 2.5 GHz Core 2 Duo Processor and 4 GB of RAM). There are three processes always seem to peg my machine:
- Firefox
- TextMate
- and something called mds
Saving my work and restarting Firefox and Textmate is a no brainer, but I didn’t know what or how to address the problem with mds. Come to find out, mds is responsible for indexing in Spotlight. If its thrashing your CPU and hogging up your RAM, you may need to verify your dives with Disk Utility.app, but for a quick fix run this in Terminal:
sudo mdutil -a -v -i off
This will turn off indexing and you should see an immediate drop in usage and let you get back to work.
Rob Dempsey, a Certified Scrum Practitioner and Agile Development coach, approached us about launching a line of Agile Development training videos. During Phase 1 of the project he requested that we create an e-commerce store capable of doing digital products with instant downloads.
The Shopp plugin for WordPress was a perfect choice and did everything he wanted to do. However, after attending a conference on marketing Video products, the client changed his mind and wanted to switch his offering to video training on a Subscription basis. He wanted to keep the store, since he would have a couple of other products, unrelated to the subscription, to offer now and in the future. The final requirement was that the subscription had to be purchasable in 1 Click. That is, once they click the button to sign up, they had to land on the check out page, and not get the ‘Add to Cart’ experience.
Continue reading ‘Using Shopp’s API to create non-standard solutions’
I was recently asked to be a guest on “Rock The Job“, an internet TV Show about using Social Media and other tools to manage your online presence in order to find, land or keep the job you want. In this episode, I stress the importance of doing pre-interview research to ensure you are going to interview for a company you’d actually want to work for, or else you might find yourself working for a criminal.
Video after the jump.
Continue reading ‘Rock The Boss’
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