Techie Tweaking

Some time ago I started noticing the nice-looking, personalised, tiny icons, so called favatars or favicons, on some people's blogs. You know, the little picture in front of your URL. Most Blogspot bloggers have the default, fat B on an orange background. How can I get my own little symbol, I thought. Said and done; I started investigating by looking at people's HTML using View / Page Source on the Tool Bar. Not that I can read, let alone write, HTML particularly well, but I just looked for some key words. So eventually I visited the Favicon website and made myself a favicon by uploading something I created over ten years ago. Then my real problems began. How could I get it onto my blog? Well, it said to just 'upload it into my root directory'. Yeah, as if! I could not find a way of doing that, and there was no result when I searched Blogger for help. So I looked at other blogs until I found another site, MyFavatar , where I repeated the process, and here comes the difference; they host your favatar and you just paste in a code that links it to your blog. It worked instantly and I thought I was a genius for having sorted it out. I do not give up easily when it comes to IT problems; I will never let a stupid machine outsmart me, if I can help it, that is. In gratitude I obviously put a link on my blog. Thank you, Favatar, for a very user-friendly website.

When I spoke to DELL's techie help desk yesterday I was given a web address to access an online form should I need it later. The techie engineer said it was a rather long URL to take over the phone, so he made it shorter for me with the help of TinyURL . Then I remembered that I had been given another TinyURL the other day when I bought something on the net. Brilliant idea! All those long URLs you sometimes come across are almost impossible to get right if you have to copy by hand and type in. These very short ones are easy to deal with if you, for instance, are in an internet cafe and can't copy from somewhere on your computer. Excellent! So I included a TinyURL field on my blog that anyone can use. Help yourselves.