Blogging Sueblimely

A favicon or “favorite icon” is the little image that you see to the left of a website’s URL in your browser’s address bar as well as next to your list of bookmarks or favorites. If you are using tabbed browsing they appear on tabs too. They get around quite a bit don’t they.

Favicons clearly identify a site as being yours – unless you are using a hosted platform and are using their default icon. For example a blogspot.com default icon clearly identifies the blog as being blogspot’s. . However much you style your template to make it look individual, without changing the favicon icon it is not totally recognizable as yours.

It is quite simple to change this situation (unless you are using a wordpress.com hosted blog which does not yet support this).

The first step is to create or download an icon. Take some time to study favicon icons on other sites to get some idea of what appeals to you. As they are tiny images only simple images work well. Icons are image files which have the extension .ico. Favicon icons need to be 16px x 16px in size and have the filename ‘favicon.ico’.

How do you create them?

The simplest method I have come across is an online utility myfavatar .

Upload an image and myfavatar will resize it, convert it to icon format and provide you with the code that you need to place in your template/theme. You can then leave your icon to toddle off and do some social-networking for you on their site.

If you are feeling artistic you could create an image from scratch using:.

• IconArt – an icon editing and drawing tool, that allows you to create new icons , edit existing ones or to import an image (or part of it) and convert it to an icon.
• Any image or photo editing program you are comfortable using, such as Photoshop or the free Gimp. Even the built in Windows program ‘Paint’ is good enough to create these simple images.

If you need a little help or inspiration:

• Iconfinder – the icon search engine – you didn’t think I made the images for this post did you
• A Google Search for “Free Icons”

Once you are happy with the look of your image convert it to ico format using myfavatar or one of these methods.

• FavIcon from Pics is an online utility which will resize and convert an existing image stored on your computer. Upload your image, press “create FavIcon.ico” and the image will be reduced in size, converted to .ico format and emailed to you. You will need to change the name of this file to “favicon.ico”.

To do the conversion to .ico format yourself you can download free programs..

•   Irfanview an image editor / viewer / converter / optimizer / scanner interface/slideshow creator…. (I use Irfanview as my default image browser and for quick image editing jobs – I like it a lot).

• Imagicon – will convert .bmp .jpg and .png files into icon format.
• The Photoshop Ico file format plugin if you want to use Photoshop.

Now that you, hopefully, know how to create your image I am going to make you wait until tomorrow to show you how to add it to your template/theme. This was not intentional – it is getting late and, tired after a hot day, sleep is calling me. If you are unfamiliar with icons then you have probably had enough for today in any case.