Galleries

• Icon Archive
  Iconarchive is one of the most popular icon directory and probably the oldest one indexing over 23000 icons from various designers and that fit into various categories. The sizes can vary from 32 pixels and up to 256 pixels.
• Iconspedia
  Iconspedia is a great alternative to iconarchive. If I can’t find anythng over iconarchive I head straight to iconspedia
• Iconstick
• Freeiconsweb
• Icon buffet
• Freeiconspedia
• Iconpot
• Deviant Art
• Freeicons.dk
• Best free icons
• Vistaicons
• IconsFree
• IconDock
• Free Icons Web
  
• Free Icons.co.uk
  
• Entity.cc
• DryIcons
• http://www.nesoft.org/free_icon_gallery.htm
• Pixel Girl
  
• Icon Bulk
  
• http://www.iheartny.com/icons.html
• http://www.freeiconsweb.com/stock_icons.html
• Web Icon Gallery
  

Search Engines

If you are in a haste looking for some icon quickly then I bet these exlusive icon search engines may help you get search for any icon quickly over the web

• http://www.icons-gallery.com/
• http://www.icofree.com/
• http://www.veryicon.com/
• http://www.iconfinder.net/
  

Icon Sets

• FamFamfam
• Axialis
• Fasticon
• IconDrawer
• Website Icons
  
• Ganaro
• Downloadpedia Free Icons and Buttons
• CoolArchive Icons
  
• Icondrawer Icon pacl
  
• UI Icons
  
• Free icons by technologica
  
• Mezzoblue Ecommerce Icons
  
• Web Applications Icon Set
  
• Iconden Free Icon Set
  
• Vista Icons
  
• Spheres Icons by mouserunner
• WeFunction free icon set
  
• Icons by Iconlet
  
• Free Icons by Exploding Boy
  
• Webdesignerdepo Free Exclusive Icons Siena
• Starfishwebconsulting Ecommerce Icon Set
  
• Iconeden.com free icon set
  
• Free mini icons by brandspankingnew.net
• Over 2660+ free png icons
  

Resources from other websites/blogs

• http://sherifabdou.com/2009/03/60-free-vectors-icons-for-web-designers/
• http://www.outlawdesignblog.com/2008/free-developer-icon-sets/
• http://ntt.cc/2008/05/12/over-480-free-and-fresh-icon-sets-help-you-to-create-your-beautiful-skins-and-themes-in-flex.html
• http://www.maxpower.ca/free-icons/2006/03/05/
• http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/03/06/35-really-incredible-free-icon-sets/
• http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/02/16/50-beautiful-useful-and-free-icon-sets/
• http://techmagazine.ws/free-icons-and-buttons/
• http://hiddenpixels.com/designer-and-developer-resources/free-icons/
• http://hiddenpixels.com/designer-and-developer-resources/free-web-icons/
• http://speckyboy.com/2008/01/01/top-25-free-icon-resources-for-web-designers/
• http://speckyboy.com/2008/07/28/96-best-ever-free-icon-sets-for-web-designers-developers-and-bloggers/
• http://www.dezinerfolio.com/2007/09/25/top-50-supercool-free-icon-sets/
• http://www.maxpower.ca/free-icons/2006/03/05/
• http://www.noupe.com/icons/40-new-high-quality-and-free-icon-sets.html
• http://net.tutsplus.com/freebies/icons-freebies/2500-free-icons/
• http://sixrevisions.com/resources/40-beautiful-free-icon-sets/
• http://elitebydesign.com/free-high-quality-icons-sets/
• http://www.webiconsets.com/
• http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/04/24-free-exclusive-vector-icons-handy/
• http://www.technacular.com/2007/02/12/collection-of-sites-providing-free-web-icons-and-buttons/
• http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/04/24-free-exclusive-vector-icons-handy/
• http://www.graphicmania.net/75-cool-free-icon-sets/

• Unreliable Traffic

  There is a good amount of traffic that may be lead to your blog through social media webistes liek Digg and StumbleUpon. But is it reliable? Till when will you be getting the same amount of traffic? Next Week? Next Month? is it possible that every post you write reach the front page of Digg or StumbleUpon

• Short Term Traffic

  Social media traffic is against the clock. It exists for a very short period. One might see thousands of visitors at one instant of time and then there would be no traffic at all.

• Lots of Efforts

  Well you need to do a lot of hard work to get traffic from social media websites. Creating a network of friends with same interests out of a pool of users is a big task. You need to be active on all the social networks. When people (mostly friends) gives you a hit on a social media website means that they are looking for the same from you. You always need to write new and fresh content that can be submitted

• High Bounce Rate

  Visitors from social media websites have a relatively high bounce rate. Almost 75% of the visitors just bounce back from your website within 3 seconds. its worth not having those visitors so that you can save your server’s resources and bandwidth.

• Unresponsive Visitors

  Even if the visitor stays back to your blog and reads your article. The next thing they do is don’t look for further articles on your blog. The can simply click the “Stumble” button and move next. This means that they have no interest in your other posts and you may get no clicks on your ads as well. A real time example is that my CTR of visitors from search engines is around 1~4% where as the CTR from social media traffic is approximate 0.08%

• Server Unreliability

  This would be a great issue if you are running your blog on a shared hosting. Which most of us do. Social media traffic comes in clumps. Coming onto a front page of Digg also called as “Digg Effect” means you can expect atleast 20,000 visitors in a couple of hours. Since the resources alloted to each website on a shared host is very limited (usually 200Mhz CPU and 32MB RAM), most shared hosts will shut down you blog for a while if you receive such a kind of traffic. If you are looking for a reliable webhost for your blog then check out WPWebHost

• Marketing on Social Media is a Big NO NO

  In terms of ROI advertising on social media is a BIG FAIL. Advertising on social media traffic is usually on a pay per impression basis, even if its on a pay per click basis, at a 75% bounce rate it is a bad idea to advertise on a social media website.

• Optimize Images – This is the most crucial thing that sucks bandwidth. Before uploading and embedding a image, make sure you optimize it for the web so that it takes less bandwidth.
• DO NOT Scale Images – I have seen a lot of blogs where bloggers upload large images and simple scale them to small sizes. This won’t affect the image loading time. Because the browser will have to download a big image and scale it. Rather than that, you should take care to resize the image and upload it.
• CSS Sprites – CSS Sprites are a great way of improving the loading speed of your pages. One of the problem you may face is how to use them, If you are great in CSS then you don’t need to worry.
• Less Ads and 3rd Party Widgets – pages cluttered with ads will naturally load slow due to several connections to be made to other 3rd party websites for loading ads.
• Ads from different Networks – if you are looking to run ads from different simultaneously then this is really a bad idea. The consequence is similar to the one above. Running multiple networks means connecting to multiple domains, which means multiple DNS queries have to be made. This can drastically increase the loading time.
• Javascript at the END – always put the Javascript codes just before closing the </body> tag. This will load the page before loading javascript hence the user will be able to see atleast some content before laoding the page completely.
• Use Less FLASH – I advocate you to use no flasha t all unless it is necessary. including flash components can forcefully suffer your blog’s load time.
• GZIP Componenets – This is a technique use by Apache. Whenever a page is about to be loaded, the server check if browser is able to accept content in GZIp mode i.e. archived mode. Archiving html can reduce the amount of data to be transferred by zipping it however this may put up some load on your server’s CPU. So use this carefully.
• Use a CDN – Well if you can spare 2-5$ each month then you should probably be using a Content Delivery Network (CDN). here is the wikipedia’s definition of a CDN. Using a CDn ca cost you much less when comp-ared to using a Dedicated Hosting Server.
  

  CDN is a system of computers networked together across the Internet that cooperate transparently to deliver content to end users, most often for the purpose of improving performance, scalability, and cost efficiency

If all above doesn't work then use a faster host. I recommend WPWebHost for hosting your blogs.

So lets start how to deal with the 404 Errors and creating custom 404 page for your website

Setting Up a 404 Page

To set up a 404 page, only 2 things need to be done

• Modifying the .htaccess file

Elaborating on this step all you need to do is create a file (incase you dont have it already in you root directory) and name it as “.htaccess” meaning that there is no filename and the extension is htaccess. Now write this in the file and upload it in your root directory

ErrorDocument 404 /notfound.html

• Creating an html Error Page

Coming to the html part now create a html document, its not limited to html document you can create a php document too ad make sure it resides in your root directory with the name as given in the .htaccess document. For instance we took the name notfound.html so you need to make sure a file named notfound.html exists in your root directory.

Thats all… now you have set up now have a try and you should see that you are being redirected to the error page on 404 error.

Well I’m feeling quite sleepy today will write out more about this topic tomorrow. Sure to come… Some Cool 404 Pages, Custom 404 Pages for WordPress Powered Blogs ad the most prominent of all Monetizing 404 Pages

Keep viewing…

• Titles and Meta
  The first and the foremost, the TITLE and the META DATA is the most important element for SEO. Keep the titles and description on each page unique. This is what Google Indexes from your website.
• Sitemap
  A sitemap is a great thing to have both in the aspect of SEO and better User Interactivity. Adding sitemap.xml to your root directory helps search engines locate and index each page from your website that is not already linked.
• Proper Functionality
  Does each of your pages work properly. The contact us page, the archives, the search functions and shopping baskets?
• Cross Browser Rendering
  The most important part for the designer, does you website looks the same in all the major browsers? I try to optimize my website for Firefox 3, Internet Explorer 7, Opera 9, Safari and Google Chrome.
• Unbroken Links
  Trust me at times they dont work. I sometimes forget to add the http:// and sometimes forget to update the links. Another good practise is to use “title” attribute.
• Proper navigation
  Are all of your website’s pages linked to each other internally ? Does the user finds it easier to get to any page of your website he wants ? Things like search box and breadcrumbs properly placed can help us a lot
• RSS
  The old days of bookmarking are gone. Users now stay updated with RSS Feeds. You can use PHP Scripts or third party apps to create RSS Feeds of your content on the fly.
• Analytics
  Analytics is important tool for analyzing your traffic, where do they come from, what page do they see, where do they go, what browser do they use are some simple questions that can easily be answered using analytics. I recommend Google Analytics
• Optimization
  Last but not the least, website optimization is the most important factor to make users stay on your website. People dont like slow websites. So I say use less graphics and better stratagies like css sprites etc. I urge you to have a look at Yahoo’s Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site

I am writing this tutorial just for fun though I dont appreciate these kinds of things. But for those who have relatively low number of subscribers (like I have right now on this , only 4 subscribers) this is a good technique to help you get some subscribers.

Create a new file with any name, In this tutorial I have used feedcounter.php then add the following code to the file and save it.

<?php
//Send a generated image to the browser
create_image();
exit();
function create_image(){
//Create the image resource
$image = imagecreatefromgif('feedcount-static.gif');
//We are making brown color
$brown = ImageColorAllocate($image, 68, 68, 68);
//Check for the get parameters
if (isset($_GET['count']) && is_numeric($_GET['count']))
$feedcount = $_GET['count'];
else
$feedcount = 21;

// Some Alignment Calculations
$bbox = imagettfbbox(7.5, 0,'verdana.ttf', $feedcount);
$xcorr = 0 + $bbox[2];    $xcorr = 36 - $xcorr;
//Add the number in brown color to the image
imagettftext($image,7.5,0,$xcorr,13,$brown,'verdana.ttf',$feedcount);
//Tell the browser what kind of file is come in
header("Content-Type: image/gif");
imagegif($image);
//Free up resources
ImageDestroy($image);}?>

Upload the verdana.ttf font file in the same directory where our php file is. Then open the URL of the php file. use ?count=[number] parameter to put any number of reader. Save the image and use it for your blog.

Incase you dont have GD Library installed on your web server you can use the one I have created. Just change the number and get the image that you want here

FakeBurner – Fake your feedburner counter