What is a favicon? It’s short for favorites icon and it’s an icon that represents your site in places like your bookmarks, in shortcuts, etc. It’s a chance for you to distinguish yourself in your reader’s list of favorites sites and they’re ridiculously easy to make.

Is a favicon important?It’s not crucial to the success of your site but it’s always good to differentiate yourself from everyone else as much as possible. A favicon will appear in bookmarks, it will appear in aggregators, and in the end it really doesn’t take much time… so you mighta s well make it.

How do you make a favicon? If you have a site logo, you can use that, or try to find something distinguishable. A favicon is usually 16×16, 32×32, or 64×64 pixel image in the .ico format. You can use other formats but the .ico format is the most supported filetype.

After you’ve created the file, simply upload the favicon.ico (use that filename just to make it easy on yourself) to your root directory and many browsers will automatically pick it up. Internet Explorer will automatically load it.

Then, add this in the header of your website (this lets all the other browsers, the ones who don’t automatically load it, know where your favicon is):

<link rel="SHORTCUT ICON" href="http://www.website.com/myicon.ico"/>

That’s it, as easy as pie.

I’ve always been fascinated by salespeople because they have one of the hardest jobs in the world – selling something. If you’ve ever read sales techniques, you’ll know that it’s hardly a hard science but there are many things deeply rooted in psychology. In this WSJ article titled How to Sell a $35,000 Watch in a Recession, luxury goods sales consultant Jean-Marie Brücker shares a few tips on how to sell high-end luxury goods in a recession. We’re not talking $300 Coach purses, we’re talking watches that cost as much as cars.

The strategies mentioned in the article:

• The macaroon technique – where you sandwich the price of an item between two statements about its benefits. “Madam, this timepiece (or diamond or handbag) comes from our finest workshop [benefit] and it has a value of $10,000 [price]. If you buy it, your children are sure to enjoy it for generations to come [benefit].”
• Say value rather than price.
• Don’t offer a discount, offer gifts.
• Positively distract other members of the party so they don’t get bored and drag the group away (since the target customer of a high end watch is typically a man, the article discusses how to show a watch to his wife so she doesn’t get bored).

It’s a quick read too so it should only take you a few minutes to complete.

This is a guest post from Pete of BibleMoneyMatters.com.

When you’re starting a blog, one of the first things that you’ll need to do after purchasing a domain name and setting up WordPress is to give your new website a design by choosing a WordPress theme. While most can probably agree that having a premium theme from the get-go isn’t essential (there are more important things like creating good content, testing and optimizing ads and promoting your site), I think most can agree that some premium themes will give you a leg up by giving you a superior look and feel, in addition to having more functionality available behind the scenes.

When I first started my blog at BibleMoneyMatters.com I was using a free template that I had found through one of the free WordPress theme websites. While the theme I chose was functional, it certainly didn’t give me the flexibility to make the kind of changes i wanted to, to take my site to the next level. After doing some research, I discovered a theme that did everything I wanted, and more. The Thesis WordPress Theme.

The Thesis WordPress Theme

Thesis Theme is a WordPress website framework that gives you a ton of flexibility to create the blog that you’ve always wanted. It gives great design, easily changeable layouts, optimized SEO (without the use of plugins) and a great support community.

Chris Pearson, designer of Thesis talks about why he designed the template:

I built the Thesis Theme because I wanted a framework that had it all—killer typography, a dynamically resizable layout, intelligent code, airtight optimization, and tons of flexibility. Now, after months of field testing, I’m confident enough to offer it to those of you who have come to expect nothing but the finest themes from me.

The theme definitely has those things and more. let’s look at a few of the reasons why I love the Thesis theme.

Superior Design And Backend Options

One of the first thing I noticed when looking around at themes is that so many of them try to do too much with the design, and become a bit too busy while not allowing you easy access to change things you don’t like. Thesis on the other hand has a nice clean design out of the box, has great readability, and if you like to tinker – is easy to customize to your own tastes. The Thesis back end tools allow you to change fonts, swap colors, update menus and change the complete layout of the site. You can have 1, 2 or 3 columns and order your columns however you want. Just about anything about your site that you might want to change, you can do it through the Thesis design and site options menus. If you’re a more advanced user, you can also customize your site further using CSS and PHP, which is made readily accessible through another menu option in the WordPress Dashboard. If you’re not as advanced there are hundreds of tutorials available that will walk you through more advanced changes.

SEO Optimized Site Framework

One of the great things about the Thesis theme is that it is search engine friendly out of the box. While WordPress sites in general do well with search engines, there are things you can do with your theme to help improve your SEO. For example, Thesis has the ability to specify each post’s title tags, keywords and meta tags without a plugin like All in One SEO Pack. Thesis also gives you the option to use canonical urls so that the search engines can index your content correctly. All of these things can be done with other plugins, but having them built into your theme is even better.

Easy Upgrades

One thing that sets Thesis above a lot of other themes is the fact that it is so easy to upgrade the theme when a new version comes out. To customize all you have to do is change two files, custom.css and custom_functions.php. If you’re upgrading the theme you just download the “custom” directory with those files in it, upgrade the theme, and then re-upload those files to the new version of the theme. Done. Upgrades only take a few minutes at most.

With a lot of other themes to make changes to your site design and layout you have to modify the theme’s core files. If you have to do an upgrade, you then have to figure out all the modifications you made to the theme’s core files, and then re-modify the theme once you’ve upgraded. That could take hours or days depending upon how many changes you’ve made to customize your site!

Support Community Second To None

One of the biggest selling points of the theme in my eyes is that it has a support community second to none. When you purchase the theme you get access to the member’s only forum where experts in Thesis are always ready to give a helping hand. In addition there are hundreds of Thesis tutorials out on the web that will help you do anything from change a background image to adding a header. If you’ve dreamed of doing something, someone else has already done it – and put out a tutorial on how it was done.

Thesis Theme Isn’t Perfect

As you can tell I’m a big fan of the Thesis theme, however, it does have its flaws. The theme does have a learning curve for newer users, especially if you want to do anything beyond the basic site changes. The theme uses what is called “hooks”, a framework that allows you to insert your own custom code or programming just about anywhere in your theme. If you want to use hooks, you’ll want to find a good tutorial on them, like the ones found on http://thesishooks.com/. Another downside of the theme is that if you don’t opt to customize your installation, the basic Thesis theme can have a pretty bland, vanilla look. So many people use the theme that your site can get lost in the shuffle if you don’t make changes.

Plugins To Make Thesis Even Better

While Thesis is great, it doesn’t address every need that users might have. Two plugins that I would suggest every new user of Thesis install once they buy the theme are:

• Thesis Openhooks: This plugin makes it easer for all users to use the hooks framework, and allows you to insert ads, text, graphics, etc anywhere in the theme that you want.
• Thesis Import/Export: This plugin allows you to export your Thesis theme and openhooks settings in case your site has a catastrophic failure and you need to re-import them from backup.

Conclusion

Since becoming a blogger I’ve tested out and installed countless themes on the websites that I operate. None of the themes, however, have come close to the Thesis Theme for WordPress when it comes to design options, optimized SEO, usability and flexibility. If you’re looking for a theme to use on your site, I wouldn’t hesitate to purchase your copy of the theme.

There’s a funny little site called Please Rob Me that scans the stream of Twitter updates for people checking into various places on Foursquare. When you check into a place on Foursquare, you aren’t home… so presumably a thief could rob you! While created in jest, it underscores an important point a lot of people miss: when you share so much information with the world, there are bound to be consequences.

While I have yet to see a news story about someone’s home being burglarized because a thief saw them check into a bar down the street, you know it will happen one day.

Be smart.

As your site grows, the likelihood that it gets submitted to a social news site like Reddit also grows. When that happens, you’ll want to get it as many upvotes as possible so that it can become more popular. The best way to do that is leverage your existing visitors, hoping they will have Reddit accounts and having them give you the votes to put you over the top. It’s as simple as putting in this snippet of code to your page.

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.reddit.com/button.js?t=1"></script>

The cost of putting a button like this on a page is that it’s an extra javascript call to an external server. While the cost may seem minimal, it’s enough that you probably don’t want to put this type of button on every post in the hopes that someone clicks on it. If you just want a standard static reddit button, you can do this instead:

<a href="http://www.reddit.com/submit" onclick="window.location = 'http://www.reddit.com/submit?url=' + encodeURIComponent(window.location); return false"> <img src="http://www.reddit.com/static/spreddit7.gif" alt="submit to reddit" border="0" /> </a></script>

It’ll put something like this:

If you want to make it a bit faster, download the image and store it locally.

The easiest way to put password protection on a directory of your website (this assumes you’re running Apache) is to take advantage of the basic authentication features of Apache. htpasswd is the command you’ll be using to create and update the files that will store your usernames and passwords.

Create the directory you want to protect and navigate into it. Next, run the “pwd” command, that will give you the full pathname of the directory. Create and edit the .htaccess file in that directory, it should have this at the top:

AuthUserFile /usr/you/hidden-directory/.htpasswd
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName "Super secret directory"
AuthType Basic
 
<Limit GET>
require valid-user
</Limit>

First line, AuthUserFile, indicates the location of your password file. You should replace /usr/you/hidden-directory/ with the information from the “pwd” command. AuthGroupFile, which we have set to dev/null, sets the list of user groups for authentication but we won’t be needing that. You will limit the users based on who has a username and password set in the htpasswd. AuthName sets the title of the username/password dialog that the users will see asking them to log in. Finally AuthType sets whether you want the password to be MD5 hashed (digest) or not (basic). For most cases, basic will work fine, but if you are concerned someone is sniffing your data, you should use digest.

If you use digest, you’ll have to follow a different set of instructions as you will be using htdigest instead of htpasswd. Remember, while the password is encrypted, any of the subsequent data you send or access will not be. You can read more about it here.

I put the .htpasswd file inside the hidden-directory so from here I just create a new user using htpasswd:

htpasswd -c .htpasswd [new_user]

You will be prompted for a password and the user will be created.

If you already have an .htpasswd file and want to append to it, use this instead (take out the -c):

htpasswd .htpasswd [new_user]

If you run into any problems (such as forgetting your login), you can always delete the .htpasswd file and recreate it.

One of the small headaches of running your own business is that you need to keep your office stocked with all the boring things an office needs, like printer ink cartridges. I use a Canon i560s printer at home and use up a black cartridge every month or two, so finding an affordable source for them is crucial. My store of choice lately has been 123inkjets.com because they carry basically any generic ink cartridge you can think of. I bought replacement cartridges for my Canon i560s for less than a dollar or two a piece, it’s really affordable.

So how do I get them for free? I combine it with Staples’ ink cartridge recycling program to get $3 in store credit! Sign up to their Staples Rewards program and you can recycle up to 10 cartridges per month and get $3 in store credit. I get the cartridges for free because I pay less than $3 and I can get $3 in store credit, which I use to buy all the other supplies I need.

Help the Earth and get free ink cartridges, a win win!

Mark Suster, a 2x entrepreneur, wrote a fantastic post on Techcrunch about the “yo-yo life of a tech entrepreneur.” The reason I think it’s fantastic, and the reason why I enjoyed it so much, is because it gives you a behind the scenes look of what it’s like to live the entrepreneur’s life. Compare the italics introduction, where TC gives a four sentence biography of Suster, with the rest of the article.

The italics part is the glitzy and glamorous part. Suster started and sold two companies and is now a VC. That’s pretty awesome no matter who you are and intuitively we know that he has to be a smart and hard working person. However, just like how we don’t see Kobe Bryant practice thousands (if not tens of thousands) of shots each day, we don’t see how hard it is to do all that. In fact, if more people knew, I bet they wouldn’t be so quick to swap lives or be envious.

If you have a few minutes, I highly recommend reading it.

As I read this hilarious Cracked.com article about six full of shit professions, I wasn’t surprised to see stock market experts as the first one listed. The statistics they cite are the same ones index fund fans cite and I’m inclined to believe that 75-80% of stock market experts are pretty much useless.

However, the bigger question, especially when you’re talking business (investing is really just business, with tiny barriers to entry), is what is your advantage? What does your mutual fund manager know that everyone else doesn’t? When I read Trading with the Enemy, an insider’s look at Jim Cramer’s hedge fund, I saw that he had a huge advantage. Newspaper reporters would tip him off about a story before it was published. Analysts would tell him seconds beforehand of an upgrade or downgrade. I would’ve given my money to that Jim Cramer because he had an advantage. (if you don’t think insider trading happens… you’re mistaken, only the stupid people who made abnormally large bets get caught)

If a fund manager doesn’t have an obvious advantage, then it’s just luck. If it’s just luck, why are you paying an expense ratio?

Why does Warren Buffett outperform year after year? He has a clear advantage. Just look at some of the deals he’s cut over the last year during the Great Recession – he pumped $5 billion into Goldman Sachs, getting perpetual preferred stock, a 10% dividend, and warrants to buy $5 billion of common stock with a strike price of $115 (it’s currently trading at $148.44). While you could criticize him on timing, he gets access to deals very few people can.

How does this translate to entrepreneurship? You have to pursue something where you have an advantage you can exploit. That something could be your passion, what you love to do even if you weren’t paid for it, but you need an advantage of some kind or you will lose. It’s true whether you’re investing in yourself or in a stock ticker.

I haven’t updated YSlow but a couple people I’ve been talking to did and they’re reporting that the newest version of YSlow will crash Firefox browsers also running the Google toolbar. Here’s a Yahoo! Groups discussion about it and it appears that the culprit is the Google toolbar, version 6.1.20091216W.

Kind of funny that YSlow, a Yahoo product, isn’t playing nicely with the Google toolbar.

In unrelated news, Google toolbar still sends data even if you turn off “enhanced features” transmissions.