Saturday, 18 March 2006

Adding a Favicon

This was more fun! First, let me explain what a 'favicon' is. See the little icon next to my URL in the address bar that looks like this?

trans_heart

That is my favicon. I happened across it at MpP . They have a wonderful collection. Delta-Tango-Bravo was another favorite site. Both have extensive collections. Or, if you have your own graphic, several sites have favicon generators. The one I enjoyed playing with is Favicon from Pics . Once you find (or make) a favicon, you must save it as an 'ico' file. A great graphic viewer (free I might add...I'm all about free) is IrfanView. Now, upload that ico file to your webspace. I use Ripway. This is a free web hosting and online file sharing service.

To get the favicon on your blogger, you need a code to add to your template, and this is it:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://myfavicon.com/favicon.ico" />
<link rel="icon" href="http://myfavicon.com/favicon.ico" />

Replace "http://myfavicon.com/favicon.ico" with the URL of where your webspace stored your ico file, & paste the code between the head tags of your blog. The favicon will now appear in most browsers address bar and bookmarks. (Not sure about the rhyme or reasoning here, but some do...some don't.) Added bonus! If you use Mozilla Firefox (why wouldn't you?) it will also show up on the tabs!!!!

Update: Favicons only appear in IE if the site is in your bookmarks. If the site is not bookmarked, I have discovered a little trick. Left click on the 'e' in the address bar and jiggle it a few times. The favicon will show up!

UPDATE:

12/29/06 - the head tags look like this: <head>and</head>

1/8/07 - it was brought to my attention by a reader, T.M., that the favicon can be saved as a 'png' file and it will work as well.

12/5/08 - Blogger has done things to our favicons. Bad things. But, there is a fix. Read about it: Fix for Broken Favicons


post signature

No comments:

Post a Comment