Free Twitter Icons – Happy Birds

We are pleased to present Happy Birds our free Twitter icon set. These 4 happy go lucky birds can be used on your blog or website to encourage others to share your content or to follow you on Twitter.

These icons are available in PSD and PNG formats.

Download for Free

You are able to use these twitter icons for both private and commercial projects. This icon set may not be distributed in any way including reselling, sub-licensing, renting, or transferring.

Spread the Word

To enable us to offer this and other items for free please link to this post and tell others about it.

Gary Vaynerchuk's Name Sucks

Gary Vee, as he is affectionately called, is gifted with many things including wit, charm, and charisma. His name on the other hand was definitely a hurdle for this loud and sometimes obnoxious (meant with love) social media champion.

He started his early online career with Wine Library, a brilliant and easy to remember name. When launching his first video blog Wine Library TV I’m sure he was faced with the retching decision on how to handle his own name. Most hoping to make a career on screen and being faced with a difficult name would opt for a much easier to remember screen name.

But not for Gary… this little fireball decided to tackle online media with sucky name in tow.

Turn liability into assets

His tenacity has turned the liability of his name into a household word… at least for us geeks and social media freaks. For those of us who follow his wisdom, we couldn’t imagine him with any other name. The name Gary Johnson just wouldn’t fit.

He built a brand on his name right down to GaryVaynerchuk.com. How can you have success on a domain that can’t be spelled correctly by 99% of the world?

Easy, Gary’s favorite word ‘hustle‘.

Doing the hustle

The first thing your eyes go to on his website is his name. His last name is broken down by syllables vay-ner-chuck. When he introduces himself on video he pronounces his last name Vay… ner… chuk drawing out and dropping dead air in between each syllable.

Not afraid to laugh at himself, Gary is constantly making fun of his own name. Making it possible for the rest of us to laugh with him.

Gary worked tirelessly to make his name as easy to understand as the message he was preaching. The end result of this is a near impossible name that we can remember. He has successfully turned his liability around.

What can we learn from this?

Gary’s success wasn’t overnight. Too often we want to go through the motions for a while and when success isn’t beating down our door we give up. Of course, we blame the failure on our liabilities.

Embrace your liabilities and turn them around so you too can also claim success. Quit hiding them under your bed hoping the world won’t notice. Trust me they will.

What makes you different is what sets you apart. Frankly, I’m tired of all the sameness out there. The web is becoming as boring as the traditional world. Everyone is more concerned with a formula for success rather than being yourself and doing what you love (wisdom stolen from Gary Vee).

Be unapologetic and be yourself… liabilities and all.

10 Ways to Chase Down Your Visitors

Let me give you a reality check. What you write is really not that important. Now before you go off and pout in the corner, let me explain.

There are a zillion blogs out there all vying for attention. No matter how good you write, or how funny you are, there is someone better than you. So what is a blogger to do?

Chase your readers!

1. Meet Your Commenters

   Meet Your Commenters is simply an awesome WordPress plugin that allows you to, well, meet your commenters. It displays web pages and social network profiles of your commenters in the dashboard. You simply go through and click to their Twitter, Facebook, Digg… profile and make friends. This is by far my favorite.

2. Disqus

   Using Disqus to handle your comments will allow you to see where else your readers are visiting. This is kind of like stalking without fear of getting arrested. This is also a great way to find new blogs. Then take a look around on your new found blog and leave a good comment or two. Your reader will see you there along with other potential readers.



3. Leave a comment on their website

   Nothing flatters a commenter more than having the owner of a blog they commented on go and comment on their site. Make their day!

4. Follow them on Twitter

   While you’re poking around on their site keep your eye out for the blue bird, and follow them. This is cool because you can learn a lot about your readers, and a reciprocating follow from them is pretty nice too.

5. Subscribe to their RSS feed

   This one takes a little bit of common sense. If you subscribed to every commenter’s feed, you wouldn’t be able to keep up with them all. Pick the best ones and subscribe.

6. Promote your readers blog

   Now that you’re subscribed to your readers RSS feed you’ll be able to post replies to their exceptional blog posts. Share the love, and spread the weath… or at least the readers.

7. Reply to the comments

   This is your best way of interacting directly on your site. Let your readers know you appreciate them. Answer comments, and mingle. Develop those social skills… it’s never to late.

8. Keep up with your posts

   Follow your stories on sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, and Delicious. Befriend those who voted and submitted your post. Repeat customers are easier to get than new ones, and they can help promote future posts.



9. Use a Gravatar

   Gravatar stands for Globally Recognized Avatar. Using one will let your readers easily recognize you on other blogs they read. Keep yourself in front of them, and your blogging niche for that matter.

10. Find stories submitted on Twitter

    Use Twitter’s search to find stories that were tweeted by your readers. All you do is search the post title, and voila you have new people to follow. The law or reciprocal follows kicks in and you have new followers. Next time you post… tweet it. Remember repeat customers.

Never forget the value of your readers. The truly successful bloggers are the ones that took the time to promote others. Take the time to toot the horns of your followers, and don’t forget to chase your visitors. Remember you’re building a community. Nurture it, and watch it flourish.

Happy Blogging!

The Many Paths to Creativity

My wife and I were at our favorite hole in the wall Chinese restaurant over the weekend, and the two of us enjoyed a wonderful, quiet dinner. After we were through the waitress brought over the basket of fortunes and let us pick our fortune cookie.

This is the part where most places mess up. The receiver of the fortune has to pick the cookie, or you won’t get the fortune destiny has bestowed on you.

My fortune read:

Don’t expect to find one right way to make yourself more creative.

Now for those of you who shun the idea of fortunes from fortune cookies… Shame on you! Don’t you know that monks are working hard in their mountain top temples typing on little typewriters just to get you your fortune.

Anyways, back to the fortune. This really got me thinking.

How often do designers block their creativity in by following their normal path of inspiration? It is good for all of us to find new avenues of creativity. Stop being a creature of habit!

Be obsessive

Now this one comes easy to me. When I’m focused on a task that is all I think about, much to the chagrin of my wife. Take the simpler tasks in life and relate it to what you are working on. If you’re eating toast think about how that toast relates to what your working on. Crazy? Yes, but it works.

Take a look around

Being creatures of habit we put blinds on. If you don’t believe me take a look around at the cobwebs on your ceiling. You didn’t realize they were that bad, did you? It is important to strive to put on new eyes from time to time and take a new look at your surrounding.

Put on a child’s mind

Think like a child. It is amazing how differently the little ones see the world than us big people. If you have trouble doing this just hang around kids. It’s contagious. Just don’t forget to wear your play clothes.

Get away

If all else fails, get away from the front of the computer, go outside, and let out a primal scream. The neighbors may look at you funny, but I’m sure they already do. Relax for a bit and tackle the problem from a different angle.

What are your recommendations for finding new avenues of creativity?



PS: My lottery numbers from the fortune are 9, 27, 33, 30, 29, 14. I expect you to share half the winnings with me.

Redemption: CSS Layouts

I took quite a bit of heat when I dared write my post on CSS vs table layout. Keep in mind it was a tongue in cheek post meant to identify the problem with fanatical design opinions rather than taking up the side of tables for layout.

One of the arguments that came up was that layouts should be done in CSS because that how they were meant to be used. I personally think doing something simply because it’s the way to do it will lock you in a box and hinder creativity. Knowing the why though will let your creativity flourish.

Anyway, I’m writing this post as a form of redemption. This is why I only use CSS.

1. You’ll be cool

   Most people will admit that they want to be cool, and the coolest designers out there are using CSS. Besides, one of the first mainstream sites to go all CSS was ESPN.com. Now you can’t get any cooler than that.

2. You won’t date yourself

   Now for all you old fogie designers out there that started in the days of 56K modems or earlier. Tables are so last decade. Get with the times. With web design it important to use cutting edge skills not what you learned when todays designers were in elementary school.

3. You’ll develop a hatred of IE6

   Microsoft doesn’t even like Internet Explorer 6 anymore. The more you work with CSS, the more you’ll curse the 17% of users that refuse to upgrade.



4. You’ll develop a good prayer life

   With each announcement for a new browser release you’ll pray long and hard that there aren’t any major changes to CSS handling that will require you to spend hours or days reworking every site you ever designed.

5. Bury the spacer gif

   You no longer have to force your tables and layout to behave by utilizing a spacer gif. Kill it and bury it.

6. Free Stuff

   Who doesn’t like free stuff. There are so many good resources for CSS that you can get every thing from templates to navigation for free. But, you won’t be able to tweak any of it if you don’t know CSS.

7. Oh yeah, I almost forgot the typical arguments

   • Separates content from design
   • Maintenance is so much easier
   • Printing is better with CSS
   • Better accessibility
   • You can do things not possible with tables

Tell me your reason for exclusively using CSS.

Rant: CSS or Tables for Layout

Which should you use for layout CSS or tables? The consensus these days would be CSS, but I don’t always agree with that. Let me stop you right there before I’m burned at the stake for design sacrilege.

While I’ll agree that CSS gives you control to do things that one can only dream of with HTML tables, they aren’t perfect. For starters… how many hacks have I had to learn to make my site work in Internet Explorer and Firefox. Then when you think your layout is just about perfect you check it in a legacy browser, and it’s time for more hacks.

For everyone that says it’s CSS or nothing remember that your beautiful layout only works because of a hack. What does that make you?

It seems like to be part of the web design “in crowd” you have to religiously use CSS or else. There are entire websites that have sprung up on the misguided determination to rid the world of tables. These websites give the all important CSS hacks a place to go and pat themselves on the back and tell each other that they’re better than everyone else.

To what end. Are CSS layouts better in any way than HTML table layouts?

1. Does the end user see a difference? Do they visit your shopping cart and find a product they want only to turn their back on it because you used tables for the layout?
   No!
2. Is there any benefit to search engine ranking for using CSS layouts (remember we are only talking layout here)
   No! Believe it or not Google is very forgiving to bad code.



3. Does a cleanly coded non-nested table layout load any slower that a CSS layout?
   No! You would be better off taking one of your JPEG images and optimizing it just a little.

So what is the big deal in all the CSS only fervor.

HTML tables are a lot easier to code, and therefore a lot easier to learn. I think it is wrong for the enthusiasm of newbies to be crushed because they learned how to code HTML tables. It is like crawling before walking.

I will personally continue to use CSS layouts. Why? Because you can do so much more from a design standpoint, and in time the table using newbie will see that also and learn the black art of CSS. Till then be nice to your fellow designer and hug a HTML table coder today.

Getting the Most From Blog Commenting

Commenting on blogs is a great way to gain exposure for your site, but are you getting the most benefit from your time? A good comment is going to send traffic to your site while a bad comment will get deleted or ignored. Follow these tips and you’ll be commenting like a pro.

Be part of the community

Don’t be a drive by commenter. Find top blogs in your industry and subscribe to their RSS feed. Make yourself a usual. Think Cheers, the TV show from the 80’s. Every time Norm walked through the door he got a hearty shout from the rest of the bar. He was popular because of his regular engaging conversation. Do the same!

Get a Gravatar

I’m really bad with names, and so are most people. But, I’ll never forget a face. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Gravatars they are user images that are tied to an email address. When you leave a comment with the email it posts your pic.

Your gravatar should be friendly and welcoming. No pics of you with bed head, screaming, or holding you favorite beer. To brand yourself and your site you can also add the name of your site to the image.

Introduce yourself

No one like to ask for someone’s name. Let the world know who you are. Don’t use keywords for your name. This is tacky and will make your message look like spam. Besides who wants to have a conversation with someone named “fast dirt bikes”.

You can use your site name in addition to you real name with this format, Russ Adams @ WebDesign.fm. Most sites will allow this, but take a look around at the other posted comments to know for sure.

Don’t use a nickname

Unless you have the strong personality to pull off a nickname stick with your real name. It’s OK for your friends in the real world call you Stinky, but the rest of us would like to know who you are. There is a trend on the internet to step away from the supposed anonymity of aliases and just be yourself.

Engage, engage, engage

OK, so this was covered earlier, but it is the most important thing that you can do. Engage the blogger and other blog commenters. Ask questions, add to the conversation, and politely tell everyone if you disagree and why.

Some blogs will let you subscribe to the comments. Come back and add more to the conversation.

A few common sense items

1. Check your grammar and spelling.
2. Reread your comment before you post.
3. Be polite and friendly. Don’t forget what your mom taught you.
4. Reread again.

This isn’t an all encompassing list, but a good place to start. What else should someone do when commenting on a blog?