How to make a Favicon?

Did anyone notice something new? No? Look again... Okay.. if you did notice, good and if not, look at the corner of your browser's address bar. You should be able to see a miniature image of myself. Many websites and blogs are branding themselves by introducing this kind of image or logo appended to their web address. Its called Favicon (fav-eye-con). Its very easy to make and fun to have. Besides it gives your readers, a visual perspective of yourself or of your persona. So do you wanna have one? I can show you how....

---->>> First you need to have an image or logo ready for your Favicon.
If you are a blogger, the best Favicon would be your image as a Favicon. If you are an artist kinda person or wanna keep your identity personal and rather represent the flavor of your blog or your personality with a logo, you can either use MS Paint or PhotoShop.

---->>>> Now you can either use Irfanview - Download Here - or GIMP - Download Here - to crop and convert the image to size 16x16 and file extension .ico

---->>>> I used GIMP as it lets you resize and convert the image file very easily.
Once you have downloaded GIMP, open the image you wanna make a Favicon of, with GIMP.

---->>>> Then Right click on the image -> image -> Scale Image....



---->>>> Scale Image window would pop up.



---->>>> Adjust Image Size. Adjust Height to - 16, Width to - 16 and click on the little nexus right beside of the height and width boxes. Then click Scale.



Then Go to File--->>Save As---->>>Microsoft Windows Icon---->>> Save.



For additional help: http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Lite_Quickies/

Now, Upload this .ico image on Tripod as many other image hosting sites might not allow you to upload .ico file. When you upload this image on tripod, please DO NOT upload the image in private folder under file manager. Create a public folder and then upload the image in the public folder.
The reason to create a public folder is that if you'd store the image in private folder, users might not see your Favicon as they don't have your user id and password for tripod.

After doing that, add following HTML between < head > < /head > tags.

HTML:

< LINK REL="SHORTCUT ICON" HREF="http://yourusername.tripod.com/_public/yourfilename.ico" >

That's it! You should see your icon now, if you did it correctly.

Hope you would find this helpful.

Stop surfing, make friends.....

Students at India's premier institute IITB (Indian Institute of Technology,Bombay) have been barred from free internet access from 11pm to 12.30 pm. Authorities at IITB believe that the ban would encourage students to socialize with their colleagues which in turn would lead to low degree of depression and suicides among the students.
Link to the article.

So, whats up? What am I thinking???

First of all, neither I'm an expert on the subject matter nor I'm affected by this sanction as I'm not a student of IITB. And secondly, who on the planet earth care about my opinion, anyways?

But guys, as 24th of march approaching, which is international computer shutdown day (I voted for "Yes, I can") this news got me thinking....
No internet for 13 and a half hours everyday??? Thats cruelty man...
For one day its okay...but everyday??? no..no..nope....
Ofcourse, every coin has two sides, and students might hook up to internet for longer hours at night downloading, chatting, blogging, but, who would go knock on the neighbor's door at 11.00 pm and strike a conversation just to socialize? And these are IITians..they would definitely circumvent the system and find other ways to go online. Also, there are many other ways to restrain from socializing, say for example, reading or watching cable TV.
I admit, most of the times, surfing is a wastage of time as this is the era of information overload. You can't get enough ever... But at the same time, this is the right time to understand what internet really is for. I mean, c'mon guys, you don't have to check your e-mails every 10 minutes or you don't have to be on messenger 24X7? Either facebook or myspace or orkut or ringo, only one of these profiles is enough to maintain second life. How many RSS feeds you wanna add to your reader? You gotta define your area of interest and you gotta limit the no of feeds too cuz almost all news rss feeds are almost same.(Not talking about Blog Rss feeds :) )

IITians are considered the best minds in India and surely they understand whats right or wrong for them. So let the verdict be left to the students....

Here are some interesting posts related to the issue

Roti, kapda aur Internet by Rashmi Bansal

Why Intelligent People Tend To Be Unhappy

digg.com Decreases Work Productivity by 43%

Zamzar: Free Online File Conversion

Ever wonder if you could change the file format .aac of the albums you bought from iTunes to .mp3 or .wma or .wav ??? Ever wished if you could change that .pdf file into .doc??? Or that picture of your buddy from high-school in .jpg format to .ico format? Ever wished you could download those videos of your favorite artists on Youtube or Google video for free? And all these without the need of any installation of software?? Zamzar, a free web service provides this service and its absolutely easy to use and fast. It can convert between 11 image formats, 14 document formats, 10 audio formats, and 13 video formats and you can convert five files at once, up to 100MB in a single session, and as many files as you want throughout the day.

For a complete list of file conversion supported by Zamzar, Click Here.



You select a file or files to convert and Zamzar will tell you which formats are available to convert to. Then you supply your e-mail address and click "convert" and Zamzar will e-mail you a link to the converted file.



Some people might concern about giving out their e-mail address because of privacy issues but Zamzar team has posted on its blog that...

* As stated in our privacy policy, we absolutely DO NOT sell, spam or market your email addresses to anyone.
* The files you upload and convert are yours alone. Again, we DO NOT sell them, forward them, archive them or otherwise use them. The only time Zamzar goes near them is to honour any support enquiries you have.

Anyways, if you still like to use Zamzar and concern about iving out your e-mail, www.dodgeit.com is at your service, which can assign you a temporary e-mail inbox for seven days.

There are many other online free services that let you convert your files to other desired file formats. One such service is http://media-convert.com/ where you don't have to give out any e-mail address and even don't have to wait for the converted file to come into your mailbox.

If you wanna convert online videos available on Youtube, Google video and many other flash based video sharing websites, Check out http://vixy.net/ and also http://videodl.org/.

You can also convert Youtube, Google video, Metacafe, iFilm, Dailymotion and many other from your browser itself by adding the Mozilla Firefox Add-on videoDownloader from here.

So now what next????? Hmm.....lets see....Ummm...I wonder....if I could rip only a part of video instead of downloading entire video. Until then, Happy Converting....