Small Green Tree Web Services

The Ins & Outs Of Favicons

Richard — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 15:41:38 +0000

Favicons are those small images that appear in the browser’s address bar and in browser bookmarks entries. Hopefully you can see our own “small green tree” icon right now in your browser’s address bar!

There are different ways to add favicons to your web site, but after a bit of research and a bit of trial and error, we think we have hit on the best method.

With this method your favicons will also work consistently with your Web-form-buddy and Web-store-buddy script URLs.

Favicons were introduced by Microsoft some years ago, and for a while browser support for them was very patchy. In theory that situation has improved. Certainly you can now enjoy the benefits of favicons for your web site without it driving you completely crazy. But although there is supposed to be a proper World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard now for favicons, in practice we reckon you’re better off ignoring that for the time being. Hey, Microsoft are involved, what do you expect!

The problem began when Microsoft decided that favicons should be in their own format. Not *.PNG, *.GIF, *.JPG or anything sensible like that. Instead we got *.ICO – the format for icons in Windows.

Originally the idea was that you placed such a graphic (called “favicon.ico“) in your web site’s root folder (i.e. where your home page resides). And if you inspect your server’s access logs you will see that browsers are regularly putting in requests for that file. This old method DOES work at least (and in most browsers), but it is not at all flexible:

You have to name it “favicon.ico“
It must reside in your document root folder
You cannot have more than one favicon for your site
Worst of all! – this method won’t work with your Web-form-buddy and Web-store-buddy URLs.

So as the web moved on, folks started to ask searching questions such as “Hey, shouldn’t this be part of the HTML standard?“. And “Shouldn’t we be able to use non-Microsoft file types?“. And “Why can’t I specify this graphic in my web page HTML? That way I get to manage the graphic in the normal way – and maybe I can use different favicons on different pages!“. On top of that, millions and millions of webmasters said “We’d also like a method that works with Web-form-buddy and Web-store-buddy too!” (Well maybe we exaggerate a little).

Enter the standards fairy – the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) . All these wishes have now been granted, and we have a new method available (supported by all browsers) whereby you add a link to your favicon in the area of your web page. The W3C ’s draft proposal as to how you should do this is here: http://www.w3.org/2005/10/howto-favicon

But here’s the BAD news: If you follow their recommendation, your favicons will not work in Internet Explorer! This is for two reasons:

1) Internet Explorer will only work with *.ICO files. So whereas the folks at W3C say you can do this:

Instead you’re going to need this:

2) But even THAT doesn’t work in Internet Explorer! You need to change “icon” to “shortcut icon“:

Or if you’re working with XHTML, it’s this:

And now, finally you have something that will work in all browsers!

(By the way, we’ve seen some folks suggesting for the “type” attribute that you should use “image/ico“, “image/icon“, “text/ico“, “application/ico” and “image/x-icon“, instead of type=”image/vnd.microsoft.icon“. This is a mistake though. The official mime type is “image/vnd.microsoft.icon“).

So how best to create and edit ICO files?

Favicons are 16×16, 32×32 or 64×64 pixel square images. With the free @icon sushi you can open BMP/PNG/PSD/EXE/DLL/ICL files and convert them into ICO files.

A listing of ICO editing software is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_icon_software

Drop Down Menu Fields With Payment Forms

Richard — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 17:21:08 +0000

We have just added support for drop-down menu fields with Web-form-buddy payment forms.

The idea behind payment forms is that you assign a price on your Web-form-buddy control panel to specific fields in your form.

In the case of text fields the purchaser can enter a quantity in the field and Web-form-buddy will multiply the price you have set for that field by the quantity entered.

In the case of check boxes, radio buttons – and now drop-down lists too – the total price is calculated taking into account your customer’s choice from these field options.

Finally – A PC Backup Solution That Makes Sense!

Richard — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 15:37:51 +0000

If you’re interested in a simple, fit-and-forget, powerful, and FREE backup solution for your PC, we can recommend MOZY (When we say “free” – you get 2Gb of free storage, but if you need more storage the pricing is very reasonable).

We discovered MOZY following a bit of a scare we had with an office PC. It was a Monday morning (when else?) and our normally totally reliable but ageing Compaq refused to wake up. “Holy cow – what’s going on!”

Now we did have a backup plan for the PC in place. But it’s at a time like this that you discover how good or bad that plan is.

The trouble is, we have tried many types of backup software for our office PC’s down the years, and we’ve never really been happy with any of them. Backup is one of those problems that if you start to think about it it’s like turning over a stone.

What do you back up? It seems practically impossible to backup up everything because of speed/storage constraints
How many backups? Do you simple keep one total backup that you overwrite each time? If so, what if you have some corruption or loss from two weeks ago? If the backup is daily, unless you catch it before the next backup dump, the error will simply be written into your backup data! The solution to this problem is “incremental” or “differential” backup” – but then that makes the first issue of storage space even harder and requires intelligent backup software
When do you backup?
Where do you keep the backups?
How do you know the restore will work when push comes to shove?

I remember on one occasion we needed to restore a backup we had dutifully kept. We had used a built-in Microsoft Windows utility which we had wrongly assumed to be future proof. I forget the Windows versions involved – it may have been 3.1 & 95 – but when it came to restore we found the backup files (from the previous Windows version) were no longer recognized by the new Windows software. The backup disks ended up in the bin (fortunately the setback wasn’t too severe).

In the case of our deceased Compaq PC we found that sure enough some key files had been getting regularly backed up across the LAN on another PC. This was using Acronis Backup (that I can’t say we can recommend). We had set up the routine some months back. How good was it going to be now that we needed to use the backups in anger?

Well what we found was that we did not face a huge problem – the most important data was saved. But all the same it was clear that it was going to take a lot of time and patience to get back to the status quo. Very tedious.
And why was that? Why was the backup so limited? Well, we had found that although Acronis claimed to offer FTP backup to a web server, it never really worked properly. And even across the LAN it was so slow and resource-hungry we had found it only practical to backup the most critical data only. The result was that we felt obliged to take a calculated gamble with the medium-critical data!

Anyhoo, the ending was a happy one. We discovered that the heatsink on the Compaq processor had lifted clear, and as a result the machine was quite sensibly refusing to boot for safety reasons. Once the heatsink was fixed the lovely beast woke up and the data was safe (I say “fixed“, the technology involved a whisky tumbler of cold water sat on top of the processor – a solution only marginally improved since then by a paperweight fixed on top of the heatsink!).

But it was in the course of all this hassle that we stumbled across a link to MOZY – and very good it seems to be too.

MOZY is an Internet backup solution – so you don’t need to worry about disks or backup media. The key features are:

simple to set up
Performs backups automatically in the background
Encrypts all files on your PC before transfer
Performs incremental backups
Backs up only blocks that have changed
Backs up open/locked files

Our experience so far? I guess we’d say “it does exactly what it says on the tin“, and we are very pleased. It seems to be able to work in the background without a fuss. That’s probably because of the capability it has to lock/unlock files. However for this feature to work you may need to change your hard drive from FAT32 to NTFS if you haven’t done so already (in Windows XP that can be done by selecting Control panel >> Administrative Tools >> Computer Management >> Disk Management).

To get a free 2GB Mozy account click here

The Form “ID” Attribute Versus The “Name” Attribute

Richard — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 16:39:07 +0000

Up until now, in a situation where you have several forms in one page, Web-form-buddy has asked you to use the “name” attribute of the form tag in order to distinguish one form from another. Like this:

Well this will still continue to work with your existing forms. But we have decided from now on to move over to using the form “id” attribute instead. Like this:

There are two reasons for this:

1) In XHTML the “name” attribute is not supported. In particular we have discovered that the popular web editing tool Wordpress (with which I am writing this!) makes it hard to use the “name” attribute with a form tag.

2) A nice feature of the ID attribute is that it is designed to provide a unique identity for an HTML element. A really good web authoring tool should make it impossible to create two HTML elements with the same ID attribute. The uniqueness of the ID attribute is why it is used in Javascript to access HTML entities. And that characteristic, of forcing a unique ID, is exactly what Web-form-buddy is looking for when you have more than one form in a web page.

So we think it suits our purposes just nicely!

Integration With Google Checkout For Web-store-buddy

Richard — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 12:16:20 +0000

We have now completed the integration of Google Checkout with Web-store-buddy.

The aim of Google Checkout is to try to make it as easy as possible for your customers to purchase from your store using a single user name and password. This fits in neatly with Web-store-buddy as, unlike most other shopping cart systems, Web-store-buddy does not force shoppers to create accounts with yet more user names and passwords. So if this has the effect of making your shoppers’ experience more comfortable and hassle-free, then it is surely likely to help you increase sales and customer loyalty.

Integration With Google Checkout For Payment Forms

Richard — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 12:32:04 +0000

We are pleased to announce that Web-form-buddy now supports Google Checkout as an option for payment forms.

With Google Checkout folks can pay using the credit cards that they have setup in their Google account. Compared to many payment methods, Google Checkout offers the buyer a particularly fast, easy and comfortable payment method.

Signing up to become a Google Checkout merchant is very simple (and free!). Google Checkout will need to post a test transaction into your bank account – and that’s pretty much it:

http://checkout.google.com

Integration has proved to be quite tricky as Google have chosen to do things a little differently to most payment processors (such as PayPal). But now the hard work is all done and it’s working very well!

The next task is to enable Google Checkout for Web-store-buddy, our shopping cart application.

Additional Password Option For BuddyData

Richard — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 15:01:35 +0000

if you use Web-form-buddy for secure forms or archived forms, the data is available at our secure portal www.buddydata.com.

Likewise, if you use our Web-store-buddy search engine friendly shopping cart, your store orders are available from buddydata.com.

Up until now, the same password would grant access to the control panel and to buddydata.com. And that stays the same – your primary password gets you into both locations.

What’s new is that we have added an option to create an additional password that grants access to buddydata only – not to the control panel. This means that access for administrative staff can be kept separate from webmaster access.

Web-store-buddy Control Panel Facelift

Richard — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 13:08:17 +0000

The Web-store-buddy control panel has now been completely upgraded to the same style as Web-form-buddy. This makes it much more manageable for us, and – hopefully – much better for you dear customer!

New Discount Scheme & Changes To Co-Branding

Richard — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 11:01:52 +0000

You may have noticed already a new option called “child accounts” on your control panel.

The idea is that if you are a web designer managing a number of different “buddy” accounts – we would like to make your life easier!

So from your “parent” buddy account, you can now login to any of your child accounts with one click. Not only that, you can also manage your child subscriptions from one place and benefit from our new discount scheme.

The discount scheme is based on the number of subscriptions you have to all of our “buddy” applications (see “more web software” on your control panel). And this includes the subscriptions of any child accounts you manage as well.

2-4 subscriptions 10%
5-9 subscriptions 20%
10 plus subscriptions 30%

The “co-branding” feature of Web-form-buddy is now easier to manage too. Again it is all done from your parent account now with any changes you make propagating automatically to your child accounts.

We hope to expand on the co-branding feature in coming months – so any suggestions you have would be most welcome!

Payment By Money Order

Richard — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 12:49:32 +0000

We have an additional payment method now for Web-form-buddy and Web-store-buddy : payment by money order.

The next one we’ll be looking to add is Google Checkout.