Privacy!

If you have any concerns visit this post:

Privacy has long been a thorny issue for Facebook: Three years ago, the social networking site unveiled its Beacon advertising project, which resulted in a class-action lawsuit. December’s privacy changes aimed at encouraging users to share more information publicly evoked plenty of criticism. And this week at Facebook’s f8 conference, Facebook announced even more changes that affect users’ privacy.

To be honest I am on the verge of leaving Facebook for good. It seems like a giant without restraint and I feel that is worrying.

Quite a simply tip this and one only for Mac users I am afraid…. although someone with a knowledge of Windows will tell us how to do it on a PC.

I use Thesis in my sites a lot. Thesis comes with an image rotator – very useful.

Just an aside here. I am looking forward to what Ian can do with Thematic and themes now he is working with Automattic.

Anyway, back to rotator and Thesis. Snow Leopard has changed the way the services menu works. You can now add a service for image resizing using Automator. In Automator, select Service and click Choose. Then choose, “Service Received selected files or folders” in the folder.app. Drag the create Thumbnail Images action underneath it and choose the thumbnail size and suffix. Finally, save and name. Now when you need images for rotator you can resize with ease.

After the last post on a new logo I thought I would try to improve the grunge look of my site. Have I achieved it please? I’m not sure. Elements work but do they work together? The white crumpled paper…. does it fit with the rest of the site design. I want to add other elements like different navigation links – maybe an image using a similar font as the header.

I never seem happy with my home site. I wish I could build one that really takes on my love of snails – maybe one day.

Playing around in Photoshop brings this….

Twitter is a real-time information network powered by people all around the world that lets you share and discover what’s happening now.

Twitter asks “what’s happening” and makes the answer spread across the globe to millions, immediately.

Twitter is easy to join. Visit the page and follow the instructions. During the process it also encourages you to find friends and also follow any other timelines that might be of use to you. A timeline by the way is the list of tweets (posts) created by fellow users.

Twitter can be useful to promote your business, is available in various languages and can be used on an iPhone, other smartphones, laptops or pcs. It can be a fun tool an information tool, or a vehicle for discovering new business contacts. It is extremely versatile and useful.

Join now. Find me @cregy and follow.

Hashtags will help promote your business in Twitter They will help you to leverage maximum impact.

An example of using hashtags to promote yourself

Over this weekend I built a coop and a run for my new chickens. So using hashtags I might add a post like this:

Built new chicken coop and run over the weekend. The chooks are crowing! #chickens #coop #run.

Now anybody using the service and searching for the terms chickens, coop and/or run will find my tweet (the term applied to posts in Twitter) through the hashtags I used.
Be careful not to abuse the hashtag system. For instance in the tweet above if I did this:

Built new chicken coop and run over the weekend. The chooks are crowing! #chickens #coop #run #haiti.

I would be adding a hashtag that I know is in current affairs. However, my post is totally irrelevant and therefore will be considered spam. This could result in people blocking my tweet but also blocking me and ultimately losing
followers. It is also poor ethically.
I could alter the tweet to read like this:

Built new chicken coop and run over the weekend. The chooks are crowing! In aid of Haiti I am offering a naming competition. Visit URL to see. #Haiti #chickens #coop #run.

You need to be creative in your tweets in promoting your business but don’t abuse the service.

For more on Twitter visit the website or read my introduction to Twitter and any posts relating to the service. You can find me at @cregy.

I love typography but don’t really know how to apply it. So I read sites like this:

An interesting discussion is one around Arial versus Helvetica.

Anyway, just thought I would share this one with you.

The most reliable way to specify a colour in HTML or style sheets remains the hexadecimal code. This is because any Web browser, even an old one, is extremely likely to recognize the hexadecimal notation as a colour code. Some Web browsers may not recognize the newer notations used to define colour or the most recent set of named colours. Outside of the standard colour names, there are a wide variety of names used for colours.

For more information visit:
Defining Colour
Hexadecimal Color Codes

The last link also has a very useful colour guide where you can grab the colours for yourself.

Block quotes or quotes are usually used to show a note from other blogs or to show a comment. You can see an example of Block quotes in this post on the iPhone.

It is really simple to get this effect. Simply add these styles to your custom.css in your Thesis Custom File Editor.
.custom blockquote { color: #452A12; padding: 10px; font: italic 1.2em Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; -moz-border-radius: 5px; -webkit-border-radius: 5px; }
.custom blockquote { background: #ce9f49; }

Changing the style to meet your sites needs couldn’t be easier:

• Change the colour of the font by setting the color: #452a12 to a new hex code
• Change the background colour by changing background: #ce9f49 to a new hex code
• Change the font by editing the font: declaration
• And get rid of the rounded corners by removing the -moz-border-radius and -webkit-border-radius declarations. These are new standards and might not be seen by your browser. If they’re not get a standards ready browser. My favourite is Safari, but Firefox and Chrome will also do.

I have added links to aid you more but if you want further help grab me on rich at cregy dot co dot uk.