I had been wondering for some time how to make a favicon. Favicons are the little illustrations that appear to the left of site addresses or URL name in the the address bar:
The default is a blank white page and that is what I had on my blog. But I thought it would be cool to have a custom-made one.
After a quick search for “how to make a favicon” and looking at the results, I liked the following icon generator: http://www.favicon.co.uk , which gives you a good summary of what favicons are and tells you how to make one, based on a pre-existing image you make or get somewhere. It is a neat tool. Not withstanding my lack of creativity, I was able to come up with this icon, which I am now using as part of my blog header illustration.
I also tried this other generator: http://www.favicon.cc. I found it real cool because of the animation. I think animation is a good resource to favicons because it can counterbalance the limitations imposed to them due to their small size. These two I made to try and improve the relation to the title of my blog (they look nicer when in their place, believe me):
Once you have generated the little icon you have to take it to the root directory of your blog (public html/yourblog.com) and then go into your themes files and look for the header.php file. In there you need to fiddle with the code editor, but it’s only a matter of locating the following line:
<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”<?php bloginfo(‘template_url’); ?>/favicon.ico” type=”image/x-icon” />
and substituting ‘favicon.ico’ for the name you used for your own icon. Since the generators usually name the icon files just like that, you might not even have to change the code at all.
Can free favicons be good? With tools like these they sure can, it is all up to one’s aptitudes, as with everything else.
