As I develop and learn more about promoting my own Facebook Fan Page, I want to share what I find and learn about with all of you.  One thing I have been most often is that many fan pages are taking advantage of having a larger profile picture, to keep your brand front and center.  So, today – I’ll be walking you through the process I took when it came to giving mine the same sort of facelift on Facebook.

Getting Started With the New Logo

First, let us take a look at my logo thus far:

Pretty simple and to the point.  It is a quick logo I came up with, and I also let you know what my projects are – just in case somebody stumbled across this page, before they checked out any of my projects.  I think I can do better.  One thing to remember when creating these images is that they can be up to 200×600 pixels in size.

Picking the Right Colors for the Job

For the color choices, I decided to go with shades of blue – mainly because in psychological terms, blue is most often associated with trustworthiness, success, seriousness, calmness, power, professionalism. These are all traits I want you to associate with me.  (Well, maybe not so much seriousness – but you get my point)

Putting the Logo in Place

Next, I want to place my logo across the top again, and this time I am using white for the logo so it is easier to read.

Giving Details About My Projects

Now, in my older version of my logo above, you can see I just named off my projects.  While this is ok, I think it would be better to visually show them the websites.  This way, a visitor of the Facebook Fan Page will know, “Hey, this guy writes and maintains some awesome looking websites!” or something to that effect.  Also, they will see the layout is similar between the layouts – so if they like Firefox Facts, then they might be interested in checking out the Web Hosting Show, because it is presented in much the same way.

Finishing Touches on the Facebook Fan Page

We have a new background for the image, we have put the logo in place and we have given more details on what exactly my projects are.  So, now we are ready for the finishing touches.  I added a 1 pixel border around the image, uploaded it to Facebook and here is the final result:

I am not claiming that it is the perfect Facebook Fan Page profile image, but it is an evolution over my last.

• Come join the fun on Mitch’s Projects Facebook Fan Page!

Once I come up with a good enough reason to do another redesign, I might even detail the steps here again.  You should always look for ways to better any project you work on, and this guide gives you a step by step reasoning behind how and why I changed up my own Facebook Fan Page profile image.

Favicons are an important part of any website these days.  They are your tiny 16 by 16 identifiers for your brand, your store, your blog or your business. If you are looking for a great tool to help you create the favicon you want to use – give favigen a shot.

On this website, you can browse your computer for any image:

Choose the image dimensions you want to use, in your next step.  Once you have done that, then hit the submit button.

Once you have done that, then you will be given a link where you can download your new favicon from to use on your own website.

Favigen is one of the nicest looking favicon creation tools I have seen in a long time.  Sure, it does not have a lot of bells and whistles, but if all you are doing is generating tiny images – do you really need a lot of bells and whistles?  Give it a shot for yourself over at favigen.com.

Ever wonder if there was a search engine devoted to just searching Twitter images? Oh there is – and its name is Twtimage.  This website is a Twitter photo search engine.  It will fetch search results from twitpic, tweetphoto, img.ly and yfrog.com.  So, how does it work and is it worth your time?

Well, to start things out we navigate ourselves to the website, and type in a search term. I am going to type in HostingCon 2010, since that happened last week.  I am sure somebody had pictures of that, right?

Darn it.  Ok, how about we go with that other big convention, ComicCon?  Whoo hoo, we have results…

When you click on one of the thumbnailed images in the search results, you are taken to the main page for that image on whatever service it was fetched from.

While it might not be perfect yet – I would definitely say to keep an eye on twtimage.com as I am sure it will only get better from here.

Rollip will allow you to upload, edit and create your own Poloraoid-like photos from any image on your computer.

Looking for a way to get that great old Polaroid photo look, without the old fashioned camera?  Say what you will about the crappy film, however, to me at least, it always felt like a step backwards moving from Polaroid to 35mm film – because sure, the photos looked better, but they were not instant.  Plus, who doesn’t miss waving their photo in the air (and sometimes even blowing on it) because an uncle’s niece’s friend that you knew from his brother’s sister told you it helped them develop faster.

Try it out on Rollip.com, and take a trip back to the way photos used to be.

Sharing your images has never been easier with the thanks of imgur.  No, this isn’t just a tribute to the fact that all the good names are taken.  Imgur makes image sharing as easy as it can.  You have a browse box, where you can select your picture from, then you continue.  The requirements are it has to be under 2MB, and in the jpg, gif, or png format. 

Have any more questions?  The FAQ would be a good place to start.  Overall I like easy, I like simple so I like imgur for free photo sharing.

I always have, and I always probably will.  With that said, I wanted to both give you some great green wallpaper and try out a new Google search technique I picked up from an article on Lifehacker.

First, here are some of my favorite green wallpapers I have found from around the Web:

Now where is the trick?

Next time you search Google Images, be sure to try typing in, imagesize:1680×1050 green.  Changing the dimensions, will change the resolution of the picture you are looking for, and insert any search term you want (doesn’t have to be green) for the type of wallpaper you are looking for.

There you have it – two for one deal just for you.

As you can see, after you have uploaded your image you can share the URL with friends, download, embed it into a web page of your own or grab the forum ready code.  Might also want to check out their sister service too, Fix Up My Pic.

Looks like they replaced my power supply and I should be back up and running as I was in a few days at most.  Going to take time to get things synced back over from my laptop to my desktop.  Overall I would say I was very impressed with how HP handled the situation.  A couple of days ago they even gave me a phone call to see how things were going and if I had gotten it back yet – that was nice.

On a side note, I can also report that Windows Vista’s image based backup service actually works! I made a backup of my PC before I sent it off and I am now back to how I was two weeks ago (even after a few reformats in between).  I am almost scared to praise them too much because then the wheels might fall off – but thus far that part of the experience has been the most surprising of all.