Around 10 million or more iPhone’s have been sold and are being used to surf the Internet. As time goes on more people will be surfing the Internet using a web phone of one type or another. This week we will focus on making our site or blog more iPhone friendly so that those who are surfing our site using an iPhone will not be lost.

Apple Touch Icon

Like a favorite icon for your web browser the iPhone has the ability to save a page to a touch icon so users can quickly access that site again. The touch icon is a 57 x 57 png image that you can set in your header. To get started you will need to create the png icon. For those that are graphically inclined just open your logo and shrink it down to 57 x 57 (you can do any box shape and the iphone will shrink it down to 57 x 57) and be sure to save it as a png. For those not so graphically inclined do the following…

1. Choose an image or logo that is bigger then 57 x 57. If it is already boxed shape that will help but is not required.
2. Go to this online image resize page. Once there upload your image you picked. Set the image size to 57 pixels for both height and width and save the file as a PNG. Download the image and save it somewhere you can find it.
3. Rename the file apple-touch-icon.png. In windows just click on the image and press F2 and you can rename it.
4. Upload the apple-touch-icon.png to your site or blog root folder.
5. On your index page add the following code to your header <link rel=”apple-touch-icon” href=”/apple-touch-icon.png”/>
6. Save your page and your done. Your icon will look something like the below screenshot on the iphone.

iPhone Theme for your Blog

If you have a blog then odds are people with an iPhone will try and surf it. Installing an iPhone theme for your blog will make it easier for them to surf your blog. I have installed the iWPhone theme and plugin on to this blog. If you install it your blog will look like below.

Redirect iPhone users to a Separate Site

If you do not have a blog and want to push iPhone users to another folder where you can then develop a more iPhone friendly design add the following to your .htaccess…

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Mozilla.*iPhone.*
RewriteRule ^index\.html$ iPhone/index.html

If you get stuck let me know in the comments.

PS – Thanks to Matt and Brady for the screenshots.

A cartoon created by artist Steinfeld.

If you have an idea for a future comic or would like to submit your own BlueFur cartoon let us know in a comment.

They say that April showers are supposed to bring May flowers, so it may not be all that long until we start seeing the brighter kind of weather around these parts. With the blossoms in the trees, the flowers on the ground, and the birds in the air, the atmosphere is just so much better. In looking toward the summer, let’s see what’s on the mind of a few bloggers.

Dragon Blogger knows that personalization is big business in the cell phone world. Many people spend inordinate amounts of money on new ringtones and wallpapers, but they don’t need to do that. They can make their own. Check out this guide on how to make a custom ringtone. You don’t need to download any software, since the editing tool is completely online.

Sam Chan has a fever. Thankfully, it’s not swine flu. Instead, he’s caught playoff fever and he’s providing his predictions for round two in the NHL playoffs. He’s saying that the hometown Vancouver Canucks will cast the Chicago Blackhawks aside in just five games. Game one came down to the wire last night!

Buzz Bishop is anything but conventional. While he certainly partook in some standard gambling and drinking fare while in Sin City, he also went for a 10K run on the Las Vegas Strip. With that desert heat beaming down on him, he went on a roundtrip run to the “Welcome to Las Vegas” sign from his hotel on the Strip.

Girlie Geek is always on the lookout for inspiration, but there are just some places that are more effective than others. What is her idea place? As strange as it may sound, she comes up with and develop many of her ideas in the shower. Don’t worry, Girlie Geek. I come up with some of my best ideas there too. Er, my shower, not yours.

Consumerism Commentary takes a look at our current economic situation and asks a very simple yet poignant question: What percentage of income should be saved to be financially responsible? Many people spend well beyond their means, so saving at all is a huge leap in the right direction for them.

Just like on your computer at home, you server keeps the current time. This is usually done on both a hardware clock and a software clock (in the OS). The difference between the two is that the hardware clock is always counting (whether the server is turned on or not) and the software is only counting when the server is turned on. The software clock will retrieve the time from the hardware clock on bootup, then start its own counting of the clock.

Much like most clocks, the hardware time will start to become slightly inaccurate over time. This also causes there to be a small difference in the hardware and the software clock. Luckily, there’s a very simple solution to this problem. You can set your server to automatically retrieve the current time from a time server every so often. Your computer at home is likely set to do this by default.

While your computer’s time server is probably set to one owned by the company who makes your Operating System, we’re going to use an NTP pool to keep our server’s time up-to-date. An NTP pool is a group of servers in a specific region which keep the correct time.

To set our server to synchronize its time with an NTP pool, first login to Webmin. Then, navigation to Hardware > System time. Click on the Time server sync tab. In the Timeserver hosname field enter in north-america.pool.ntp.org. We’re going to be using the North American NTP pool, since our server is located in North America. Check the Set hardware time too box and (if you like) choose to update the time periodically. Press the Sync and Apply button.

There you have it, you server will now have an up-to-date hardware and software clock.