Hey guys! Ok. Today has had its fair share of ups and downs. But it had an up that totally surprised me (in a great way!). So today, after locking myself, my wife, and my 14 month old son Landon out of our house, in the rain, and wasting $40 bucks on a 2 minute locksmith, I’m finally back inside! Hooray!!! The first thing i did was text some buddies to see if they were playing Modern Warfare 2 (SicWitDaPistols … invite me). No luck. Next best thing? Aha, let’s pull out the trusty MacBook Pro! And boy am I glad I did! But we will get to that in a few minutes…

Lately I’ve been making some minor changes to 365icon.com to improve its SEO in an attempt to pick up more organic traffic from Google and Bing, and other search engines as well. Aside from that, I use a few different plugins that keep track of daily visits, pageviews and (mainly) referrals because I literally love running this website and interacting with you all. One plugin that i particularly enjoy is Wassup. It has a WordPress dashboard widget that tells me how many people are currently on the site, and where they came from. The great part of that is the simple fact that its in the dashboard and takes two seconds to view. Another great thing about it is that if someone previously typed in a keyword or phrase in Google, then clicked on a 365icon link, it will show that particular url string, allow me to click it, navigate to that exact search query, and see exactly where 365icon.com landed in the Google search results for that particular keyword or key phrase. Nothing revolutionary going on there, but it’s cool and very convenient, nevertheless.

So i did just that. I logged into my WP dashboard, scrolled down to view the current visitors and site referrals, and clicked on a link to one of my visitor’s Google search… and lo and behold! Our somewhat popular post NorthStar iPhone Icons was sitting pretty in the second spot on the first page of Google for keyword “better icon styles for iphone”! Now, I see plenty of our pages ranking daily anywhere between 2nd and 4th placement on the first page of Google for various keywords, so generally this would not have been so exciting. But as i was looking over the site that ranked higher than mine, i glanced down at the sites that ranked directly below us, and… ZOMG! It was Apple.com! Now, I’m not trying to toot my own horn here, but they just so happened to be 2 notches below us! LOL So Apple.com’s post was for Facebook icons for the iPhone, iTouch, and iPad that are located in the iTunes store. Ummm… newsflash…they are the creator of the iPhone. No search for “iPhone anything” should yield results that rank higher than Apple.com’s, IMHO. But hey, I’m not complaining!

So aside from this strawberry margarita I’m sipping on right now (no, literally… as i’m typing this post), this has really been the highlight of my night. Outranking Apple.com for an iPhone related keyword on Google is definitely something to remember. I will NEVER delete these sceenshots . Well, thanks for listening to my embellishment! TGIF everyone!!!

View All iPhone Icons

Also view:

How to Change Your Mac Dock Icons

View this post HERE

Right now if you skim our inventory, you will find the likes of Star Warz (a huge hit!), Mario Bros, unique Twitter birds, etc. But what we want to do is take it back to the basics… arrows, search buttons, check marks, stars, chat bubbles, and others. I mean, if we’re going to give away free skittles, why leave one or two colors out? Why not give away the whole bag? So that is pretty much where I am at with 365icon right now. I would most likely be looking at offering over 25,000 icons to start with, and eventually moving in the direction of over 100,000 icons, and so on.

My question to you all is this: “Is this something that would benefit you? Would this be useful to you webmasters and bloggers?” Please leave a comment below!

“We are determining the cause and will provide an update shortly.” then shortly after followed up with:

“Update: we are defending against a denial-of-service attack.”

They later posted:

“We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly.

Update: the site is back up, but we are continuing to defend against and recover from this attack.

Update (9:46a): As we recover, users will experience some longer load times and slowness. This includes timeouts to API clients. We’re working to get back to 100% as quickly as we can.

Update (4:14p): Site latency has continued to improve, however some web requests continue to fail. This means that some people may be unable to post or follow from the website.”

And just today, posted:

“Due to defensive measures we’ve taken against the ongoing denial-of-service attack, some Twitter clients are unable to communicate with our API, and many users are unable to tweet via SMS.

We are working as quickly as possible to restore our full service.”

As we are moving into day two of the attack, things seem to be moving in a forward directly, slowly however. Though we have not been able to tweet through the web, we have managed to post a few tweets through TweetDeck and Tweetie. The question in our minds is “when is Twitter going to take advantage of its potential and start earning some money?” Google and Facebook were hit with the same DDoS attack and had very little trouble nipping it in the bud. Maybe having a general source of revenue had something to do with it, you think? Can’t hire someone who is qualified to be a chief security officer of an entity as huge and socially relevant as Twitter without the bread to back it up. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not ignorant to the fact that Twitter is a very well funded organization, but In any case, having some form of revenue surely wouldn’t hurt. Makes you wonder if a new business plan will become more of a front burner project for the little blue bird in the near future. Either way, from all of us Twitter fanatics, Twitter, we send our best wishes to you!

Other Twitter related posts

I was delighted to see that twitter has made a very refreshing, and overdue, revision to their homepage today! Taking a break from a new website I will be launching this weekend, http://twitterbugg.com, i logged out of its twitter account (@twbugg) and when i went to log into my account for 365icon, wham! There it was. Fresh, clean shades of blue clouds and sun rays… and of course, the icnonic twitter bird (which looks to be updated as well).

It seems like Twitter has been multitasking lately. They just officially changed the title of “updates” to “tweets” yesterday, and now this. I likey. =) Now if they could only throw in all of the bells and whistles that the 3rd party apps like Tweetie and Tweetdeck incorporate in their user experience. Either way, I’m hoping that the new additions will continue to come out. I use Twitter all day everyday. If my iphone was shower proof, I would be tweeting about that in the mornings. No, really. But hey, who isn’t addicted to Twitter? One tweet and you’re hooked. Anyhow, good job guys. The homepage looks great. Keep up the good work, and keep the updates and additions coming!  Cheers!

TGIF Everyone!!!

I love Fridays. They normally mean the end of a long work week and the beginning of an uber-fun weekend. Even if you are a robot enjoy your job, it’s like it’s some sort of ingrained instinct to yearn for those sweet two days off. And when it’s a 3 day weekend…oh man, forget about it. It’s like you and everyone you know magically got a second birthday! Everyone is running around like they got the extra biscuit at the dinner table! Even now that I work for myself, there are times where those 5 days of work seem like a modern day version of Driving Miss Daisy… except slower.

One may ask “what exactly is it about the work week that is such a drag?”.  Well, here is my breakdown of the work week, Monday through Friday:

Monday is the dreadful “I’m ready to get off already and I just walked in the flippin door” first day back at work.  You’re dead tired, and what’s even more convenient, so is your boss. And it’s showing.  Tuesday is the “Ok I’m kind of back in the swing of things” slow workday that drags like Dennis Rodman in the mid 90′s.  Wednesday is hump day aka “I’m already looking forward to the weekend… Friday stop hiding! I can see you!” day.  Thursday is mysteriously a carbon copy of Tuesday, except you’re coming down with a major case of weekend-itis.  And then… ahhhhh… breath that Friday air in. Your feet are up (no, literally), your internal headphones are on, and you’re watching the clock tick minute by minute like a 5 year old on the night of Christmas Eve! (In my case, back in the day, I was sitting in the back row of a Verizon B2B call center, either with my phone off the hook or using it to prank call my fellow employees.)  5 oclock hits and its like the school bell went off!

Ah, the joys of earning money and getting time off to spend it. If you are at work as you are reading this, steal some time from the company you work for take some time off today and check out the icon pack of the day. I guarantee you won’t be disappointed. Today’s icon pack is called Denim Social. It is a huge (38.3 MB to be exact) compilation of 108 (told you it was huge) social media icons that are laced with a really cool denim texture. They have amazing attention to detail (stitches and everything) and will surely look great in almost any project or application.  Enjoy the icons, see you over the weekend, and again… TGIF!

What’s your favorite thing about Friday?
Feel free to make a comment below.

Traffic stopping excitement!

This little guy has the right idea!

There’s no doubt that dark websites are becoming more popular day by day. What exactly is a “dark” website? Well, a dark website is a site that utilizes darker background tones and more colorful accent tones. Some people still look down on the idea of having a dark website, saying that they prove to be harder to read for most viewers. I personally love dark websites, which is obvious with one glance at 365icon.com. And apparently, so does Keven from KevenCrafts.com. This week 365icon.com was featured in his post “25 Awesome Dark Website Designs“. I was honored to have my site included in this list. It was my first time visiting his site, and boom, there it was. And to top it off, 365icon is at the top of his list! How awesome?! I started this site to simply keep track of all of my favorite icons that i found from around the web, so this was definitely a cool find. Big thanks, Keven!

What do you like more, light or dark websites, and why? Share your opinion by commenting below.

Today we released an awesome container pack that has a sort of grungy feel, and incredible attention to detail.  This is one of two packs that we are putting out.  We were thinking of putting out the second container pack tomorrow, however, we ultimately decided that might be interpreted as a “wasted” opportunity for our viewers to get a “new” icon pack.   I mean, it’s a new pack, but it’s not a “new” pack, if you know what I mean (two container icons packs, two days in a row???- nah, we’re better than that!).   So we are listing the new pack today in conjunction with the original container icons pack that we put up this morning.  Sort of like a “twofer”.  Then we thought to ourselves “Hey, who doesn’t like a twofer?  Why not give our loyal visitors something extra?”.  So we are now making every tuesday “Twofer Tuesday”.  Every tuesday, we will post two free high quality icons sets instead of one!  We are excited about Twofer Tuesdays, and are thinking of more fun ways to bring new free resources to the design community every day.  Thanks so much for your support.  We have gotten an incredible response in the last week, and we can’t wait to see what the future holds for 365icon!

We want your feedback! What do you suggest we do to make 365icon a more fun and resourceful place?

One of the things that stuck out to me when reading interviews with Todd, and when viewing the sites in the BuySellAds network, is that they yield high percentages of targeted ads. That’s a huge factor in my book. I was recently browsing one of my favorite tech blogs and noticed a Colgate banner splashed across the top of the site. Let’s be honest here, a toothpaste ad has no place on a tech blog. It’s untargeted junk. Wasted space. At least, that’s my take on it. So it is a real pleasure to now be a part of the BSA network of ad publishers. I’m looking forward to testing it out and seeing where it goes. The open ad spots should be going up soon. I still need to figure out where they should go, how many there should be, etc. Plus I am still tweaking the site. I was thinking of adding a slider to the “Icon of The Day” banner at the top of the page, or creating another slider section for the top 5-10 highest rated icons. I personally would rather do what my visitors would want, so don’t be shy… Let me know what you think! If you have any suggestions, please post a comment below.