Featuritis is a term used to describe software which over-emphasizes new features to the detriment of other design goals, such as simplicity, compactness, stability, or bug reduction.
Featuritis is often accompanied by the mistaken belief that “one small feature” will add zero incremental cost to a project, where cost can be money, time, effort, or energy.
I’ve got a huge problem with Featuritis. “If I’m already building feature ‘x’, I’ll add in feature ‘y’ and feature ‘z’, too!” Pretty soon I’m trying to maintain a bloated application with so many features no one likes to use it. Or a project gets so big and complicated I never even build it. I’ll revisit it months later and wonder why the hell I didn’t build it!
In my opinion, one of the most valuable commodities we have is time. As a solo entrepreneur, time is what limits me, so anything I can do to save time (and not waste time) is a huge boon to my business. Striking back at feature creep is something that I have gotten better at, but I always need to be wary of it.
A favicon is a small icon associated with a website or webpage. See the monkey head in the address bar next to http://www.monkeyknifefight.com? That’s a favicon. If you bookmark this website, then the monkey head will show up in your bookmarks list (at least in most modern browsers). The favicon also shows up on the tabs for each website if you’re using a tabbed browser. And you are, right?
Favicon How To:
Making a favicon is easy, really. There are two ways to do it. The first way is to take any jpg, gif or png and run it through a Favicon generator. Here’s the best one I’ve found:
It’s totally free and works great. Save the favicon.ico that is generated, and put it in the root of your website. You’ll be able to see your favicon if you type in http://www.YOURURL.com/favicon.ico. Replace “YOURURL” with your url!
Once it’s uploaded to the root folder of your site, it will automatically get picked up by web browsers. If you want to be sure you can put a reference to the favicon in the HEAD of your webpages, like so:
HTML Favicon Reference:
*
XHTML Favicon Reference:
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That’s it!
Favicon How To Questions
Why can’t I just use a jpg, gif or png without converting it? You can, but Internet Explorer only recognizes the ico file extension, so you might as well go through the easy step of converting it to a favicon.ico.
How can I make my favicon look better? If you want the background of your favicon to be transparent, you have to use a gif, then convert that to an ico. Animation is also allowed, but IE doesn’t recognized animated gifs, so it won’t work on those browsers. They still degrade nicely for Firefox, so you can still go that route if you want.
That’s really it. It’s quite easy to do, and even if you have a crappy favicon I’d bet that it helps get people to visit your website, bookmark your website, and it gets you more page views. It’s silly to have a site and not create one.
I just received notification of a new advertiser in Commission Junction, a new shoe store named Shoebacca.com. I went to the site, hoping and expecting to see a big grinning Chewbacca pitching shoes, but no such luck. What a shame. Get it together Shoebacca.
OMFG, is Facebook down? Twitter? Oh noes! Check out WebsiteDown.net – it’s basically a url checker. I went looking for a site like this the other day when one particular large site was down all freaking day. It’s clever, simple, and SEO’d pretty well. I don’t think they are going to make any money, but whatever.
As I’ve mentioned before, I hate looking for new domains. The process is tedious and infuriating. But at least now I have a site that makes the process a little better: www.domarama.com. Results are returned instantly in a variety of tlds, which is really nice. Check it out!
I’ll be honest, the whole Shoemoney System bugs me. I signed up a few weeks ago to see what it was all about, and here are my quick opinions:
1. The system was amazingly basic. As in, “there’s this company called Google that you may have heard of” kind of basic. So you waste a lot of time with “training” on what the internet is all about. It drove me crazy.
2. It’s $197/month. That’s really expensive. For that kind of dough you can join a website that provides a nice service, like SEOMoz, Raven, or others. Maybe I’ll review some of those at a later time.
3. Jeremy might have some good ideas, but when I think of him I always think of the old saying about “big hat, no cattle”. He has a good talk, but I feel like he got a little lucky with ringtones, and he became internet famous from that. And from then on out he’s steamed along on being internet famous. I’ve never heard him with any new ideas or thoughts on things that really work online.
4. He has terrible spelling and grammar. I know this isn’t a big deal to many people, but it’s really hard for me to take someone seriously when they can’t spell. It’s a huge pet peeve of mine.
5. When I took advantage of the money-back guarantee, I was treated very rudely by the rep. They were very snarky with me. To me that give some credence to my “big hat, no cattle” thoughts.
6. Jeremy is a little bit black hat. I feel like if he thought he could make money spamming (and get away with it), he would. He just always seems to have had that attitude.
Bottom line, I think the Shoemoney System might be right for some people. Maybe if you can barely turn your computer on in the morning and have no idea what Google and Facebook are, you can give it a go. I don’t know anyone trying to make money online that’s in that boat, though.
Last thing: I’ve never met Jeremy. Maybe he’s a really nice guy, I really don’t know. I think that we go about our businesses in different ways, and that’s fine. The internet is a big place, and there’s room for all of us to make money online. I wish him luck with his business endeavors, and hope they all work out!
I noticed earlier today that I had a few WordPress blog posts ranking in Google, but the title be displayed was in this format: “MonkeyKnifeFight.com >> Blog Archive >> This is the title of my post”. Needless to say, that isn’t very SEO friendly. It’s especially a problem if you’re using an older WordPress theme – they don’t tend to be SEO friendly, either. Luckily, the fix is very easy. Open up the theme’s header.php file, and right near the top will be the title tag. Just replace it with this:
Does anybody have any good domain parking solutions? I dumped a dozen of my unused domains on the free Sedo domain parking, and so far in the past week I’ve made a whopping $0.02. I’m not retiring soon on my parking income, that’s for sure.
I post about SEO, LinkBuilding, Affiliate Marketing, Domains, Offline Marketing, Monkeys, PHP, MySql, Amazon, Blogs, PPC, Tech Stuff... Pretty much everything.
