What's A Favicon?

It seems I learn something new about blogging every week, possibly every day.

Until last week, I had never heard the term "favicon".

I have noticed that many blogs have icons that appear in their feeds and in the URL field of the browser.

So I decided that I wanted my blog to have that feature too.  I thought there was something I needed to do to my feed setup.  So I asked the always helpful people at FeedBurner.  They said, it's your "favicon". You need to set it up in Typepad.

Favicon, hmm.  So I sent an email to the always helpful people at TypePad and I was pointed to this page.

So it turns out that a favicon is a file type, specifically favicon.ico, that contains the icon that is displayed in the feed or the URL.

There is a great web service called Favicon From Pics that will take an image file that you upload and create the favicon.ico file you need.

Then you upload it to your blog server and that's pretty much all there is to it.

I hope some of you find this useful. I am looking forward to seeing lots of little head shots all over the Internet!

Comments

[Andrew]

Photos are tough favicons. Often Blurred. The best I've seen is Feld's. But congrats on your discovery.

[Rafi]

That head shot is nearly impossible to make out at that size though. Maybe if you started out with a tighter crop of the face.

We're using a small crop of our logo (just the "OH") for our favicon at OhWord. By the way this web site trick goes back a long ways.

[Michael Parekh]

Cool Fred...thanks for the tip...works pretty well.

[Otis Gospodnetic]

Favicons predate blogs by many years, actually. :)
Also note that the favicon need not be an .ico file - you can use a PNG. For example, look at the page source for Simpy for an example of how that's done - look in the HEAD block.

[Don Dodge]

Thanks, Fred. I have often wondered how to add a picture to the URL/Feed, but never took the time to figure it out. Thanks for saving us all a lot of time.

I have subscribed to your feed for months, but didn't get around to adding you to my blogroll until today. Your other post today "The reason I prefer browsing" inspired me to do it.

Thanks,

Don Dodge

[Jason]

I noticed your favicon showed up recently. I just learned how to do that myself last month, and I've been running my own site for years.

Isn't it odd how some things just fly under the radar?

[hey]

At least in IE, Favicon appearance isn't the same all the time, and can be random... No reason that I can figure out why they appear and disappear from my favourites.