Archive for March, 2008
Free online backup solution
One of the main reasons I parted paths with Blogger was there was no easy way to backup and restore my blogs there. I did write a Perl script for backing up, but moved to WP before I wrote the restore tool.
BlogBackupOnline is a free tool for most users. It will backup, export to other formats and restore your blog if you should need to do so. You sign up and it will back up your blogs daily. You can restore or export your blog as needed. It does not back up your blog images ( photos, images, video ) yet. They hope to add that in the future.
Storage limits are 50 Mb per account, but since you are only backing up text that should be more than sufficient.
How to create iPhone icons and separate page icons
Creating icons for iPhones and the iPod Touch is not all that different than creating bookmark icons. First you create a 57×57 png image.
If you want an icon for all of your website or a default for pages that do not have individual icons then just name your image:
apple-touch-icon.png
and upload it to your home directory.
If you are on Blogger or some other software where you can’t upload the icon you can place it anywhere on the web and create the following link in the ‘head’ section of your pages:
<link rel=”apple-touch-icon” href=”http://your-icon-location.com/your-icon-name.png”>
If you have different pages people might wish to bookmark and you wish to have a separate icon for each then:
- create the icons
- upload them to the root directory of your website
- In the head section of pages that you wish this icon to appear add the following:
<link rel=”apple-touch-icon” href=”http://your-site.com/icon-name.png”>
I tried doctoring photos and shrinking them and using them and the results were pretty good. Gimp works well for creating icons this way. One site reported that creating larger icons and letting Apple convert them resulted in clearer pictures. It didn’t for me but if you are using photo images you should give it a try.
Apple will round the corners and gloss up your icon. You just need to create the square image and let Apple do the rest. ‘Trust the force’. 
I could not get this to work on an old section of a website that uses frames. It may or may not work on framed sites.
If you change or add an icon it does not update on users phones/touches. It must be rebookmarked for the new icon to appear.
