Or, The Introduction of the MacStansbury Icon
That, folks, is a real piece of history. I say that, because for a long time, I've been celebrating December 17th as the birth of MacStansbury.com. And, in the spirit of the festive occasion, I was going to show off the fancy new icon. And that's where the idea fell apart. You see, as I was going through my old files from the past 11 years, I found something troubling; not only was December 19th not the birth of MacStansbury.com, it wasn't even December. I first posted something on MacStansbury.com on November 1st. It wasn't all that great. See it as it was back then: 
However, just because I posted it then doesn't mean that's when I started the site. No, I registered the domain back in October, around the 15th. It finally got to the registrar around the 20th, for some reason, and the DNS propagated so the world could see the carnage by the 28th, when I hurriedly put up some text to hold people's interest until I could get an artist to put up something that looked nice. While I was waiting for somebody with talent to show up, I found out how to create a favicon. The favicon is that thing you see in the address bar or on your favorites bar, with the tiny picture. I say "found out how to create" rather than "created" a favicon, because my first attempt wasn't very favicon-y: 
I used GraphicConverter, and I messed it up entirely. For no apparent reason, I left the thing stand, a messed up version of the MacStansbury.com Official Logo. In 2005, while coming up with The Blorg group-blog, I figured out how to make it, and created this thing: 
It's not exactly standard, but if Blogger can get away with a gigantic favicon, so can I. There were the ever-so-subtle orange edges, the color The Blorg was originally designed in, then darkened to make it more legible. Seeing as how I was back to singularity, I decided to dump that, and figure out a new favicon idea. For that matter, I wanted something I could use for my Gravatar, Favatar, or anywhere else I need a unique icon that sold my image. I've been using either a customized version of the Ein avatar from the [adult swim] message board, or just the plain avatar, or a squared version of my about page picture. Since I'm not into copyright infringement, and I'm not an artist, I had to figure out something rather simple. After a grand total of 10 minutes, I'd created the icon above. The idea I had was simple, I needed an icon that accomplished three things: 1. Kept up the motif of black and white from MacStansbury.com 2. Needed at least two letters from MacStansbury, since that's sorta what I do 3. Had to be a "woodcut," meaning you could cut it out into one piece of wood After thinking about it for a couple of days, I thought I'd look at just what the 'M' would look like in the brackets. The background was just a couple of rounded boxes when I first made it up, and it was just to make the original "MacStansbury.com" stand out from the first design's brushed-metal background. The font is, and has always been, Gadget, introduced in the old Mac OS 8 days. I keep holding on to those fonts, since they were just so well-designed, and they make really nice title fonts. I created the outline of the M, and made it fit inside the brackets. And then saved it. And that was that. I toyed with the idea of a 'MSN' or even 'MS,' but that was just like a certain large software company, and I think they have some sort of legal precedence or something. Besides, the 'M' looks nice enough on its own, and it's easy on the eyes. Look for the logo wherever MacStansbury is sold.
status: published
lastmod: '2006-12-17T21:23:15.000Z'
author: John Stansbury
cms: wordpress
custom:
podPressPostSpecific: 'a:6:{s:15:"itunes:subtitle";s:15:"##PostExcerpt##";s:14:"itunes:summary";s:15:"##PostExcerpt##";s:15:"itunes:keywords";s:17:"##WordPressCats##";s:13:"itunes:author";s:10:"##Global##";s:15:"itunes:explicit";s:7:"Default";s:12:"itunes:block";s:7:"Default";}'
similarterms: macstansbury favicon icon created make idea back version found december thing couple blorg reason brackets days background messed picture needed
_utw_tags_0: 'a:2:{i:0;O:8:"stdClass":1:{s:3:"tag";s:7:"history";}i:1;O:8:"stdClass":1:{s:3:"tag";s:12:"macstansbury";}}'
However, just because I posted it then doesn't mean that's when I started the site. No, I registered the domain back in October, around the 15th. It finally got to the registrar around the 20th, for some reason, and the DNS propagated so the world could see the carnage by the 28th, when I hurriedly put up some text to hold people's interest until I could get an artist to put up something that looked nice. While I was waiting for somebody with talent to show up, I found out how to create a favicon. The favicon is that thing you see in the address bar or on your favorites bar, with the tiny picture. I say "found out how to create" rather than "created" a favicon, because my first attempt wasn't very favicon-y: