Sunday, January 11, 2009

adding a favicon to your blog

As I was reading through my blog subscriptions yesterday, a post made via Twitter/Blogger caught my eye. It had to do with favicons. A favicon is that small graphic that you often see up near the address bar on your browser. For example, when you're looking at a Blogger blog, you'll often see the orange icon with the white B. That's a favicon.

The note that I saw had to do with making your own favicon and installing it on your blog or website. That sounded neat! You have to keep things fairly simple though. These graphics are only 16 x 16 pixels. That means that you can't put a whole lot of detail into them. Still, you can make your site look just that little bit more unique. I added one to this blog. Hopefully you can see it. It should look like this....Okay, I take that back. When Blogger uploaded this, it changed. My ink splat is not really that sickly greenish color. It's supposed to be gray, and I hope that gray is what you see when you land on this blog. Yikes.

Anyway, if you want to give it a try, here's the blog post that was recommended by Blogger. It's on a blog called, Rose DesRochers - World Outside My Window. She describes exactly what you need to do. It's really fairly simple and straightforward. You do need to have a site to host your favicon image though since Blogger doesn't let you upload .ico files--that's the filename for favicons.

Lastly, this worked for me just fine using Firefox and Internet Explorer. Apparently with Safari I'll have to figure out how to clear the old favicon out of my browser cache before it'll upload and recognize the new one. So, if you're browsing via Safari, that's why you probably still the orange and white Blogger favicon.

Just thought I'd post another way you can make your blog even more unique. :-)

4 comments:

  1. thanks for the info, this is excellent

    ReplyDelete
  2. my favicon (it's part of my former banner) only shows up in Opera that I know of, IE6 (the other browser on my pc) doesn't want to show it... No clue if Firefox or IE7 shows it. Here's the blog I learned about favicons:
    http://bloggeruniversity.blogspot.com/ there's lots of other cool stuff too.
    BTW the ink-blob in the favicon appears gray on my screen :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. grey here too - using firefox :) thanks for the tute!

    ReplyDelete

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