I’ve been using Silvio Rizzi’s excellent Reeder for iPad for the past several days. It’s far and away the nicest Google Reader application for iPad, and maybe anywhere. One thing that I noticed about it was that for some of the sites in my feed there were big fancy icons, while others were stuck with favicon.ico

ArsTechnica has one of these fancy icons and in the source of their page, I found:

<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="http://static.arstechnica.com/apple-touch-icon.png" />

Once I had that, the rest was easy. I found an image that I wanted to use, and scaled it to 150 x 150, then saved it as a .png. I uploaded it the root directory on my website and added that line of html to the top of my WordPress theme. According to the Apple documentation, the ideal size for iPhone is 57×57, but it says that the OS will scale it for you if your icon is a different size.

Done and done.

As an added bonus, if someone wants to save your site as an icon on their iPhone or iPad, they will get your fancy icon, instead of a crappy screenshot of your webpage.
via Safari Web Content Guide: Configuring Web Applications.

Right to Left

One of the important things to understand about how browsers read your CSS selectors, is that they read them from right to left. That means that in the selector ul > li a[title="home"] the first thing thing interpreted is a[title="home"]. This first part is also referred to as the “key selector” in that ultimately, it is the element being selected.

via Efficiently Rendering CSS | CSS-Tricks.

The truth is, Zuckerberg needs your data. His business is built upon it. The most important thing to understand about Facebook is that you are not Facebook’s customer, you are its inventory. You are the product Facebook is selling. Facebook’s real customers are advertisers. You, as a Facebook member, are useful only because you can be packaged up and sold to advertisers. The more information Facebook can get from you, the more you are worth. In response, a FB spokesman told me: “Im sorry you feel that way.”

via Online Privacy: Who Needs Friends Like Facebook.

Dear ADP,

It’s 2010. Your website is very very broken. Your website does not even allow me to login from my mac. Several of your competitors websites do. Please address this now, or I’ll be moving on to a new payroll provider.

Thanks!

Archie

PS – I’d really like to have paperless paystubs for people with direct deposit.

YouTube is about creating and watching the worlds biggest video collection; therefore, the design should make the video the star. To that end, the new look is more subdued, stripped down and simple than before. The design should help ease users into advanced features, while providing power users with all the functionality they want.

via YouTube Blog: The Video Page Gets a Makeover.

Fantastic key learning from @bud_caddell and @mikearauz presentation.

Via Web Video Thunderdome: Branded vs Unbranded, You Decide – 2010 SXSW Interactive.

Clarity Trumps Persuasion

According to MarketingExperiments, there are three essential questions all pages must answer:

Where Am I?

What Can I Do Here?

Why Should I Do It?

via Web Design: Clarity is More Important than Persuasion.

Online video provider Brightcove has announced that they will be officially supporting HTML5 video for their customers. Brightcove is the video platform for more than 1000 customers including high profile websites such as The New York Times and Time, Inc.

via Brightcove (and therefore The New York Times and Time, Inc) Announces Support for HTML5 Video – Mac Rumors.

The brand’s digital platform includes a dedicated Web site, LLBeanSignature.com, which will sell the line’s updated Bean classics like straight-leg washed chinos, checked shirts, chambray shirtdresses and leather moccasins. The site will also include shopping tools that allow users to buy complete looks styled by the line’s creative director, Alex Carleton, founder of Rogues Gallery. Heritage items, pulled from the company archives and updated, will also be for sale on the site. The brand’s Facebook page will also make its debut this month.

I’d like to be a snazzy dresser. As far as I can tell, there are two ways to achieve this goal.

Option one is to spend all my money at Barney’s and become a slave to fashion. I’d get myself some fancy pants, and some tailored sweaters, or what-the-hell-ever fashionistas wear and I’m sure I’d be dashing. The problem is that place is super expensive, and well, I can’t afford it. Option two is to get into the whole UniQlo/H&M disposable clothes thing. But clothes that you wear 10 times and throw away sound like a nightmare to me. And the stores rotate the stock so much that you can’t ever get the same pair of pants twice. Plus, if my pants only lasted for six weeks, I’d have to go shopping all the time. Uggg.

See, what Beans has going for them is that you go there today and get the same Double L Chinos that they’ve been making since 1912. They make high quality goods and they stand behind them. They are, however, not very fashionable.

Thats why I’m hoping that their new L.L. Bean Signature Collection will become a realistic third option for me. High quality, reasonably priced clothes with enough fashion quota to pass for work clothes in Washington, DC.

via Memo Pad: L.L. Bean’s New Signature… Martha’s Reality… – WWD.com.

Think of advertising as oil and Google as one big emirate. What happens when the oil runs out?

Maybe it already is. Citing a “Natural Born Clickers” study by ComScore and Starcoma, Ad Age last year reported that “the number of people online who click display ads has dropped 50% in less than two years, and only 8% of Internet users account for 85% of all clicks…What's more, the 8% of Internet users that compose a majority of clicks is also down by half from the last study, which found 16% are responsible for 80% of clicks. The 2008 study found half of all clicks come from lower-income young adults.”

I totally stole this link from Tim Boyd.

via EOF – The Google Exposure | Linux Journal.