This is an old old old old old post – Alex King’s Twitter Tools does this entire post far more effectively than this little post does!

I’ll start this off with a bit of an explanation of what RSS is. It stands for Really Simple Syndication and its the best thing since sliced bread. If your not using it your actually driving away readers. Put it this way. How many sites do you visit on a daily basis? You want to read all of your friends entries, but your not going to go to each and every page all the time are you!? Not if you’ve got as many feeds as I do! With RSS you go to one page, bloglines or if you already have a gmail account (and who doesn’t!) you can go to google.com/reader and start adding feeds. To get you started my feed URL is http://feeds.feedburner.com/Eruanna (I use feed burner so I can manage my statistics.) The main advantage is that if you read those tween sites that use an awfully small font then you can actually read the posts in the feed reader.

If your using a hosted blog service like blogger, wordpress.com etc then you already have an RSS feed. There should be a link to it on your site, if your using wordpress then your feed is yoururl.com/feed

So firstly, if you’re not using twitter then your missing out on something theoretically pointless but really really addictive. So if you’ll look at my sidebar <– which I have my twitter feeding into.

Heres how I imported my twitter into my sidebar. (Alex Kings just released a flickr plugin
Download and install the FeedList Plugin. I tried to write my own but I gave up! Then activate it and in your sidebar.php page write the following:

<ul class="twitterFeed">
<?php feedList(array("rss_feed_url"=>"RSSURLHERE", "num_items"=>5, "show_description"=>false,"before"=>"<li>", "after"=>"</li>", "random"=>false,"sort"=>"none","suppress_link"=>true,"show_date"=>true));?>
</ul>

Add your RSS url into the specified space. and tada you’ve imported your twitter feed to your wordpress blog. There are many variables you can change but these are the ones I used.

Don’t think me heartless for carrying on as usual. I just wanted to post this to give people an idea on how to upgrade their mac’s ram. As you will see over the next few posts I’ve been keeping myself busy. I’ve also made a new layout which you can see. More on that in upcoming posts. Though in theory this ‘tutorial’ applies to every laptop. Just ensure you have the right ram and then undo every screw until you find where it goes. Trust me, thats the way the professionals do it.

I’m not as good as this tutorial because I didn’t make a video of it, but if I’m honest it wouldn’t make for interesting viewing because halfway through I went home and then it took me 4 hours to get the last screw out, by which time you’d have gotten bored.

If you don’t trust my instructions (possibly a wise choice) be sure to print off the Apple official guide to have handy and don’t worry about your warranty, its considered a user upgrade so it doesn’t void it.

First you need to get the right RAM. This all depends on the configuration of your mac. Mines a 2.16Ghz Intel Core Duo with 1gig of ram (which is how I ordered it). To find out your computers spec click the apple in the top left hand corner of the screen and select About this mac a little window will pop up.

There we go, slow little bugger isn’t it. I’m upgrading because I need to run photoshop, flash, neooffice, firefox, adium and itunes all at the same time and it just makes my laptop die. I usually run with 10mb free ram! Damn this program intensive course!

ok, so now we know our computers spec we need the right RAM. Looking on the apple docs site shows us we need SDRAM in Double Data Rate Small Outline Dual Inline Memory Module (DDR SO-DIMM) format, 1.25 inch or smaller, 512 MB or 1 gigabyte (GB), 200-pin and PC2-5300 DDR2 667 MHz Type RAM. Gibberish

What you do is take the east way out. You go to Crucial.com and select your country. Type in your manufacturer (Apple in case you weren’t sure!) select your product line macbook pro – dont get confused with mac pro here! Then the model you found out from the about this mac. In my case 2.16Ghz Intel Core Duo. It’ll present you with the correct ram for your laptop at really good prices. No I’m not pimping them or anything – they really are pretty good prices. I ordered a 1gb stick.

Now wait a few days, Why not entertain yourself by commenting on every single entry on my photoblog?
click to read more »

As Gravatar has been having server issues for the last few months as mentioned in an interview with the creator on The WordPress Podcast and Rhys has been going on about them I’ve had a look into Favatars, but first of course you need a favicon! This post is here to teach you how to make favicons.

Because I know the majority of my readers are windoze users I will be covering both windows and mac ways of doing things, but there wont be any windoze screen shots I’m afraid.

Firstly, Making Favicons on a Mac.
note: this plugin also works on Windows
If you have photoshop, download the donationware plugin by Telegraphics here copy the .plugin file to Macintosh HD:Applications:Adobe Photoshop CS2:Plug ins Then load photoshop.

Open a new 16 by 16 image and create your little favicon, I’ve heard some people say its easier to do 32 by 32 and then rescale, so if you would rather do that feel free. Once you’ve got your image go to file save as type in the name favicon and be sure to select ico from the drop down filetype list.

Alternatively if you dont have Photoshop, create the icon in your graphics program of choice and save it as a .bmp, then download the shareware program Graphic Convertor and under the picture menu click colour, select 4-bit (16 colours). Save the file as a ico (windows icon).

Making Favicons on Windows
The way I’ve always done it is to use IconEdit32. Its a very nifty little program. Create your icon (remember 16 by 16) and save as an ico file.

Once you have your .ico file upload it to your root directory, /pubic_html on an apache server, and add these lines of code between your head tag.
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://domain.ext/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />
<link rel="icon" href="http://domain.ext/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />

Now if you use wordpress download the favicon plugin and have fun

Incidently if you know who made the strawberry on my favicon, please do say. I would credit the site I got it from but it was a xanga site and we all know what they’re like dont we