Traced Image Tour

Hello,

I just had a really cool week in British Columbia with Traced Image. They are a alternative rock/worship band from Calgary, Alberta. Sound technician was my job, and they were touring BC to celebrate and promote their new album that was shipped to them on Thursday this past week.

It was an awesome time! I had a blast helping them out and hanging out with them in the car/van and at the shows. I also came out ahead... I think... They gave me a T-shirt and I'm expecting a signed CD too.

Now its time to cook supper... Yay for pizza!!

Search Engines

I promised a post about search engine submissions. So here it is.

Many search engines (Yahoo!, MSN Search, Google, and others) employ the use of "robots" or "spiders," as they are sometimes called, to travel the web from link to link indexing web pages. They are simply computer programs that connect to web pages just like you or I would via a web browser. The information they find about a web page is brought back to the search engines servers and computers for analysis and indexing. These robots typically travel from one page to another by links and will never find your site unless you are linked to by another web page or site. To overcome this you must submit your site or page to some search engines and maybe get someone to host a link to your site.

To submit all you need to do is head to the links below. You type in your site address and maybe confirm it by typing in a code or by signing up for an account (as is the case with yahoo).
Google - http://www.google.com/addurl.html
MSN Search - http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx?FORM=WSDD2
Yahoo! - http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html

Now, submitting will never ensure that you'll be added to the search index for any of the above search engines. Also note that it may take up to a month for a search engine to put your web page into its index once it has been submitted.

To ensure that you'll get in the index make sure that you focus on content. Web pages should always be about content first and any other items second. Most people really like web sites that are informative and helpful. Google's robot is "smart" in this way. It can interpret meanings of word groupings and it will rank your page based on your content.

If you want to improve your we site for searchability check out Google's Site Owner section on their About Google page. You'll learn about how Google and some search engines rank pages for credibility and popularity.

Over and out!

favicon.ico

Well its another slow day here. I just lost my last post due to a browser mal-function. So now everytime I finish a paragraph I'll be hitting the save button, even if it is a little clunky.

I've been tinkering with the website most of the morning, checking out statistics from yesterday and trying to figure out how some things work. I'll be tinkering with it for the next week or so until I have everything figured out and the site starts to look a little better, there are still some graphical bugs that need to be worked out.

Today my project was to eliminate all the errors I was getting. I was continually getting error 404 for the file "favicon.ico". I had a pretty good idea of what the file was and what was requesting it, but I did some research anyway. My main resource was The Site Wizard.

The favicon.ico had its beginnings with Internet Explorer 5. It allowed web publishers to attach an icon to their website so that when a user bookmarked their site the icon would show up in the users bookmark menu. Cool idea because it allows you to make your site stand out.

I was continually getting errors because my main browser, Mozilla Firefox, attempts to download the file for every page it downloads so it can display the icon in the address bar. Solution: create a custom icon file named favicon.ico.

To create one you will need an icon creator of some sort. There are several online I'm sure, just search in Google for "favicon.ico". If you want to use a graphics program to create an icon file, you could try the GIMP. Your file needs to be either 16x16 pixels or 32x32 pixels, and in either 16 colors or 256 colors. Those are some general guidelines. I noticed there were other settings in GIMP's icon export tool.

So now I have a custom icon for my site and I'm hoping to see far fewer errors in the next couple days.

Look out for information on submitting sites to search engines very soon!

Enjoying Snow

Hi all! You might not believe this, but I was really enjoying the snow today. Fresh snow seems to make everything seem clean, new and fresh. Brings things back into line, or something like that.

Life here goes on. I am very excited for my website, as most of my friends know. It allows me to have a place where I can show people what I can do, as well as share some interesting tidbits of information.

Now I remember exactly why I was starting this post. Stephanie and I are getting married next summer and I wanted to announce that we're going to be putting together a wedding website sometime in the next couple months. I'll be sure to post a link for it here as well as on my website. I'm so excited for that.

The start of the journal...

Well, here goes nothing. I had once decided I was never going to join the Blog revolution but here I am writing my journal online. I hope you'll enjoy my musings and experiences, and hopefully I'll get a chance to record some funny stories!

Type to ya later!