What is a favicon ?
You see that little M logo on a black background in the address bar ? That is this site's favicon. A favicon is a small file preferably 16x16 pixels or 32x32 pixels that gets to be displayed in your browsers address bar when you visit a website. If you haven't noticed them yet. You should start looking for them. They are a very simple way to make your website a little more memorable. Some browsers even display the favicon for links that you have bookmarked. In short if it's something that sticks out it will help your visitors remember your site easier.
So lets get started. There are two methods I prefer over all others to create this little image/logo. One is to start with an image that you already have and the other is to create a text based favicon using a free tool. Lets start with the image as that is probably the most harder way. Lazy people skip ahead now. First you need to have a square image that you have either created or have rights to use on your website. Next you will need an image editor to scale the image down to the size we need and to save it as a favicon. The best free image editor that I know of is IrfanView it's great download and install it really quick if you don't have it. If you are using a different image editor good luck. I'm going to asume that you know how to use it. If you are using IrfanView drag the image into it and then go to Image > Resize/Resample... Leave all of the default selections as they are and only change the width and height to 32x32 after that Ok your way out of that menu and then go to: File > Save because this image is super tiny to begin with we don't have to be greedy with quality. Drag the quality slider all the way up to 100. Under the Save as type: dropdown select: ICO - Windows Icon name the file favicon (All lower case.) and Save it.
Great you just created your very own favicon. For the lazy ones out there there is free software online that will allow you to create a text based favicon. It is called AntyFavicon. I have a link to them in the sidebar at the very bottom. Check out some of the other great resources that I have for: Web Design/Dev Tools. Back to the favicon. Go to that website enter in some text pick your colors and click on the save as favicon file button. Doesn't really get any easier then that.
Now that you have your favicon either created from an image or text you will need to put it on your website. The cool part is taht there is no extra coding you need to do and nothing else to modify on the actual website. All it takes is for you to upload that favicon file into the same folder that your index.html file is located in also know as your public_html or www folder. Once you do that it should start showing up in your browsers address bar. If you don't see it right away you might want to try clearing your browsers cache (ctrl+r to force refresh) or using a differnet browser that has no cache 
Easier then you though right ?
Adding Meebo to your Website
Meebo is great I use it every day. It's the best free online chat program that I know of. It allows you to centralize all of your contacts into one online location. (Think having one messenger for: AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, MySpace, Google Talk, ICQ, Jabber...) Sounds amazing right. Well it is ! If this is the first time you have even heard about Meebo I would suggest going to their website and signing up for an account after you log in to your Meebo account you will be able to start adding all of your messenger accounts to it.
The cherry on top is that you can now embed a Meebo messenger in your websites so that people can chat with your while you are logged into your online Meebo account. This is really easy to do and the chat application even tells your visitors when you are not online so that they can leave you a message.
In order to make this all happen you will need to get the code that will create the chat application from Meebo. From inside your Meebo account click on Accounts > meebo me! > Add A New Widget Give it a cool name this is what will show at the top of your chat application. As you can see I named the one on this site: "Live Chat" and select a size that you think you might like then click Create A New Widget. Since not everybodys websites look the same we can now go in and customize the colors of the chat application. To do this click on Accounts > meebo me! > Modify (For the widget you want to customize) There are some really cool default color schemes you can select from or you can make your own. When done press Done duh! The html code required to created your chat application on the fly is located here: Accounts > meebo me! > Widget embed: You will need to copy all of the text from that text field and add it to your website.
In my case I simply created a new Text Widget in my WordPress Administrator Panel: Appearance > Widgets > Text I like to do it this way because the Text Widgets allows me to place my little Meebo Me! chat application wherever I want to in my Sidebar. Hope you enjoyed learning more about how to set up a Meebo Me! widget on your website.
Tunnel your connection with Putty and Firefox
You might be trying to bypass a firewall block to some of your favorite websites: MySpace, Facebook etc. Or attempting to make your connection more secure on a public network. This type of connection encrypts your data in a secure socket layer and hides your browsing.
Requirements:
Hosting Account with SSH access.
SSH client. We will be using Putty.
Firefox Web Browser.
First you will need to have access to an SSH connection to your hosting account. Most web hosts should be able to provide you with one. If you need a web host I have a short list of my favorites on the Webhosts page. The only two that I have verified for ssh access are Hostgator and Bluehost. They both require that you provide them with photo id via email or fax and it has to match the account information on file. This is because providing you with SSH access is looked at as something more dangerous. It's like giving someone Administrator rights on your computer. You would want to know that they really are who they say they are. Wouldn't you ?
Once you have your ssh username, password and server IP address (You should obtain all of this info from your hosting company) you will need to set up "the tunnel" you can think of this as a real tunnel that will connect your computer to a second computer through which all information will be flowing. Essentially what you are doing is browsing the same content from a different location. Since Most people are on Windows machines I will be primarily focusing on how to set this up on a Windows box.
In order to set up the tunnel you will need an SSH client. A very good an popular one for Windows machines is Putty. Since Putty is such a light application you don't even need to run any installation wizard just double click it and it will start right up. Make sure you have Session selected in the list on the left side then fill in the Host Name (or IP address) field with this: username@000.000.000.000 Of course replace the word username with your username and 000.000.000.000 with the actual IP. Next lets give this connection a name an save it. Type something like SSH tunnel under Saved Sessions and click Save. We are half way there. We have set up how and what we want it to connect to. Next we need to set up the tunneling. For this expand the SSH option in the list on the left side and then click on Tunnels. In here type 9999 in the Source Port box then check the Auto and Dynamic options and click Add. We want to save these changes so go back to the Sessions option and click on Save, again. All done here. Lets connect! Double click on the saved connection and it should pull up a command like looking prompt and ask you to authenticate with your SSH password. Type that in and press enter. (The password will not show up at all. Not even stars. This is for extra security.) You are now connected. You can minimize that window but do not close it because it is keeping your tunnel open.
Next you will have to tell Firefox to access all web content from that remote IP address though the tunnel. Before we do that lets run a little test to see what your current IP address is. You will need to browse to IpChicken and take note of your current IP address. After you have done that go to: Edit > Preferences > Advanced > Network (Tab) > Settings... > Select Manual proxy configuration For SOCKS Host type in localhost for Port use 9999 that is the port we configured putty to forward information through earlier remember ? Now visit IpChicken again and the IP address reported should be that of your hosting server.
PS: If you are on Linux and have ssh access all you need to do is run: "ssh -D 9999 username@000.000.000.000" from your shell session (Leave the window up).
Congrats you did it you can now browse from your hosting server however remember this does not mean you are untraceable. Your hosting company has all of your information on file and they can tell what IP address you are connecting to the ssh tunnel from. Another note to make is that you will not be able to browse anything at all if you close out of your putty connection. This is because you have configured Firefox to use that proxy connection. If you want to stop using the tunnel for browsing and revert to browsing from your own IP you will have to edit the setting in Firefox to the default: Edit > Preferences > Advanced > Network (Tab) > Settings... > Select No proxy.
Get a real domain for your MySpace account
Before we go any further this works for any social networking website that allows you to have your own user id url. So lets get started. First thing you will need is a domain name and a hosting account. You can get both of these from one of the great companies I recommend on the Hosting Page.
After you have set up your hosting account with the domain name of your choice you will need to tell your domain to redirect all of the visitors to your MySpace page or Facebook page. My preferred way to do this is called an: .htaccess redirect. Every hosting account has a public folder where you can upload your website some companies call this folder www and others call it public_html I've seen companies that have both. Either one works and they both do the same thing. The www or public_html folder is the root folder of your account. Whatever you put in there will show up on your domain name. However what we want to do is make it so that whenever someone goes to your domain name they get your MySpace or Facebook account. For that we need to set up a redirect.
First you will need to create a text file I like to use Notepad simply because I am on a Windows machine most of the time. However any text editor should do just fine. Open up a text file and copy and paste this code into it:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domainnnamegoeshere.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domainnnamegoeshere.com$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.myspace.com/usernamegoeshere/ [R=301,L]
Replace domainnnamegoeshere.com with your domain name and: usernamegoeshere with your MySpace url nothing more nothing less. For example If I were to do it with my domain here is what the code would look like for me:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mikewebguy.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mikewebguy.com$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.myspace.com/mikewebguy/ [R=301,L]
You will now need to save this file with the name .htaccess However don't do that just yet. If you are on a Windows system be careful because windows will more then likely not listen to you and add and extension to the file which we do not want there. It might add .txt (Notepad) or .doc (MS Word) In order to prevent this form happening there is a setting you will have to temporarily change. You will have to tell Windows to stop hiding file name extensions so that you can modify them. Don't get scared it's a lot easier then it sounds. You will have to go to: Start > Control Panel > Folder Options > View (Tab) > Then un-check the option: Hide extensions for known file types. Don't close this window just yet. Instead of clicking Ok click Apply as we will change this back after you are done.
After you click Apply go back to the text document and now you should be able to save it as a file called .htaccess without any other extension. If it saves it as .htaccess.txt or .htaccess.doc it's not going to work. All done with the .htaccess file. Go back to the Folder Options window that you left up and check the option: Hide extensions for known file types. Now you may click Ok.
This .htaccess file is very important because it does all the work for you. You will now need to upload it to your hosting account inside of your www or public_html folder. Each hosting company is different but all of them shoudl provide you with FTP access or access to a File Manager in your hosting account control panel from where you should be able to upload/download files. There might already be a default .htaccess file in your www or public_html folder however if you are not using your hosting account for anything else you should be ok with overwriting that file. If you do use your hosting account for hosting other domains then I would recommend to simply add the code to the existing .htaccess file and not overwrite it.
One last thing to keep in mind here is that a domain name usually takes anywhere from 24-48 hours to finish propagating. What this means for you is that during the first two days your domain name might not work as expected as it is still trying to talk back to every server on the intertet and broadcast it's existance That's it if you browse to your domain name after it has finished propagating it should simply redirect you to your Myspace page.
Cloud
