Favicon me!

It's time to add a favicon to your Blogger.com blog - one little tip that keeps your blog looking professional as well as helping to identify it among a group of website pages. For years professionals have used favicons to identify their websites. For those with blogs hosted on their own domains, it's been an easy enough process to create the .ico file and upload it to the home directory.

But for those of us using Blogger, we were left out in the cold. Not any more! If you look at your browser tab, you will see the custom icon that I use for my blog as well as my website, DonnaMcNicol.com

I use a stand-along blog reader, RSSOwl (which I'll be reviewing in a later post) but it give me a chance to easily show you how favicons help differentiate your blog. The standard B for Blogger blogs and W for WordPress blogs are obvious....and boring. ;-)

Blogger has made the process even simpler, you just need an image that will be quite clear (keep it simple) and you can upload it. They will handle the conversion to a .ico file.

Here is a blog that explains the process in more detail: How to Add Your Favicon to Blogger It uses the old interface at Blogger. If you are using the new dashboard (not sure if everyone has been converted), here is how it will look to you (the steps are the same). Click to enlarge.

Don't be afraid to try several images. Once loaded you will see the small image on your Blogger layout page. Don't like it? Not clear enough? Load a different one.

Here are a couple of place to search for icons: Find Icons and Icon Finder Think about what you want to represent your site. It could be as simple as your initials, a logo you already have or something connected to the purpose of your blog. For me that was easy....at least the first time. I am a writer, so I chose a quill pen. Later I changed to a small head shot of me. Oh, and remember my write-up on Irfanview? That's what I use to resize images and save them as an .ico file. Works perfectly, I even make icons to use on my desktop shortcuts. Happy icon hunting!