Techie Stuff | Techie Stuff

Great Twitter header photo’s that work!

admin — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 09:55:51 +0000

Following on from our guide on how to add a “header photo” to your Twitter profile, here are a handful of designs that we think work well and might just give you some inspiration!

Add your Twitter cover image

admin — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 12:45:02 +0000

Following in the footsteps of Google+ and Facebook, Twitter last month turned on the ability to add what it calls a “header photo” to your profile.

This is different from your profile image, which is more of an icon; the header photo is a background image.

Header photo’s are viewable to visitors to your timeline who use iPad, iPhone and Android apps, as well as through the main twitter.com website.

Adding your header photo is easy; just navigate to the gear icon at the top right of the page and click on “Edit Profile”.

From there, click “Design” in the menu on the left. About half way down the page you will see a section titled “Customize your own”.

Upload your image, making sure that the minimum dimensions are 1252x626px and that the file size is less than 5MB, and remember to hit save at the bottom of the page for your changes to take effect!

Android passes 900,000 activation mark

admin — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 10:37:41 +0000

Android boss Andy Rubin took to Twitter today to deny rumours that he is preparing to leave Google, and also revealed that there are now over 900,000 Android device activations per day.

That figure is up slightly from the 850,000 activations per day he mentioned back in February this year.

Charge your tech at the bedside

admin — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 10:24:43 +0000

Here at Techie Stuff we like useful tech, and we also like anything that keeps bedside cable clutter in check.

Users can now charge their phone or Kindle via their Pure bedside radio with the new Pure USB universal charger kit (SRP £14.99). The charger kit can be plugged into any Pure bedside radio with a PowerPort, which includes Siesta iDock, Siesta Flow, Chronos iDock Series 2 and Chronos CD Series 2.

Twilight (SRP £139.99), Pure’s combined bedside digital radio and wake up light also has a PowerPort and now comes with the USB universal charger kit as standard.

PowerPort provides power for USB accessories solving the problem of running out of plug sockets next to the bed.

The universal charger kit comes with a handy carry case, retractable cables to keep everything tidy and is compatible with the majority of mobile phones including Nokia, Motorola, HTC, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, LG and other devices including the Amazon Kindle. iPhones can also be charged via PowerPort using the standard iPhone cable that came with your phone.

Olympics come to Freesat

admin — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 15:18:23 +0000

It has been announced that Freesat will carry all of the BBC’s 24 live HD Olympic channels throughout the London 2012 Olympics, offering the full range of live BBC Olympics coverage.

In addition to the 24 temporary BBC HD Olympics channels listed in the Freesat TV Guide, Freesat viewers will also be able to access the live ‘streams’ via the BBC Red Button service. Freesat’s customers with Standard Definition boxes will also be able to see all of the 24 BBC Olympics channels in Standard Definition.

In a Freesat press release Managing Director of Freesat, Emma Scott welcomed the non-exclusive agreement with the BBC, saying: “We’re totally delighted to be able to offer Freesat viewers these great BBC HD services. It is going to be an amazing summer of sport and the London 2012 Olympics in HD will truly be a sight to behold. This is the latest great example of the quality and choice in TV programmes available to Freesat customers, all subscription-free.”

5GB of Cloud Storage from Google?

admin — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 14:57:37 +0000

An exclusive screenshot obtained by TalkAndroid reveals that Google’s new cloud storage service, rumoured for release early in April, Google Drive will give users 5GB of cloud storage.

Cloud storage is something that Google have obviously been considering for some time – back in 2006 a leaked presentation from the search engine giant spoke of a service called “Gdrive”.

How important is Social Media to Google Rankings?

admin — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 10:10:49 +0000

In a Google “Webmaster Questions” webcast, one webmaster asked Google if they use data from Facebook and Twitter as a ranking signal.

Google’s answer – “Yes”. Watch the video below to find out more…

Monitoring your social media presence

admin — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 08:47:08 +0000

If you use social media to market your business, chances are you want to know everytime your brand or business gets a mention. You might even want to keep an eye on what is said about your competitors?

But how?

Well there are a couple of really handy (and free!) tools which will monitor the internet for your keywords and then let know what’s been said about you.

First up there is Google Alerts; simply visit http://www.google.com/alerts choose what you want Google to notify you of, and how often, type in your email address and press create.

Next up, is Social Mention. It’s actually very similar to Google Alerts and you’ll find it at http://www.socialmention.com

Understanding your statistics

admin — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 12:32:29 +0000

It’s quite easy to get confused looking at your website statistics. What’s the difference between hits and pageviews? What are hits and page views?

Well, quite simply a hit is each file sent from the web server to the web browser. One image = 1 hit. One page with 5 images = 6 hits (one for each image, and one for the HTML file itself).

A page view is what it says on the tin. Everytime a visitor to your site loads a page, that is one page view.

Are you using Google Webmaster Tools?

admin — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 07:48:37 +0000

If not, and you’re wanting to see how your site is performing on Google, and how to improve it’s ranking then setting up Google Webmaster Tools is a must.

What is it then? Well, once you’ve verified your site by either adding a meta tag to your hompage, or uploading a HTML file you can find out how Google see’s your website.

Some of the most useful features for search engine optimisation though, can be found under it’s “Diagnostics” section. There you will be able to find out what you can do technically to help your site find it’s way up the listings – things like duplicate meta tags or page titles for instance.

You can also help Google find your pages by telling it where your sitemap.xml file is.

Get started at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools