That’s my word-of-the-day. Did you see the cute pink little flower next to the web address in your browser window? That, my dear sisters, is a “favicon.” It was surprisingly easy to create. Here’s how I did it:
- Find a simple photo or graphic that represents you and/or your blog/website. Search through your photos, you may find some interesting pixels to crop out of a picture.
- Reduce your image size to no more than 32 x 32 pixels in your photo processing program of choice, I’m using F-Spot photo manager available for free. It seems that 16 x 16 or 32 x 32 are the standard sizes. Then save your image.
- Next, open your image in your favorite graphics editor in order to change the photo type to a *.ico image type. For this I used the GIMP Image Editor, also free, and save your new icon image with the name “favicon.ico”. OK, the name is rather generic, but it worked!
- Now’s the hard part…access your website’s file system (such as through your ftp tool or through cpanel). It could be free too, depending on where and how your website is hosted. This one is hosted by Sustainable Websites, not free but very reasonably priced.
- Upload your new favicon.ico file to the public_html folder where your blog’s files are kept. I’m using WordPress, so I put my favicon.ico file directly in the “public_html” folder since that’s where my “wp-*” folders are kept.
- That’s it, log out of your site’s file manager, clear the cache in your browser*, “close all the windows, open all the windows” and voila! You’ve got a cute little icon next your website’s address. At least that’s how it worked for me. How about you?
