How to make Favicon for Your Blog

First lets start with what a favicon
actually is. It is a tiny logo that lies
just beside the website URL in the
browser, and beside the title of the
website in the tabs of the browser.
The advantage of having this
favicon is that it gives your website
or blog a different look when you
are browsing some other tab, and
one of the adjacent tabs has your
website open, and there you can
easily recognize your website. Even
when browsing the bookmarks, the
particular website can be easily
recognized using the favicons. The
favicons for bloggers are usually of
16 x 16 pixels in size.
Now for a blog, there are many
easy ways to create a favicon that
can look good and that may match
the theme of your blog. For
wordpress, i.e. the self hosted
wordpress blogs, the process of
creating favicons is pretty easy.
But for the same thing in
Blogger.com, the host doesn’t
accept .ico images so there is a
different way of placing the
favicons, which will be discussed
later below.
Here are a few ways that can help
you create a favicon for your blog -
Shrink the logo
For most of the webmasters and
bloggers who have a pretty decent
squarish logo for their blogs, they
just shrink it to the desired size of a
favicon and use that itself, by
changing the file type into .ico
format.
Create a letter from MS Word
Those who prefer to have a simple
favicon with a letter with some
good font, and shrink it, can just do
the same with MS word and capture
the screenshot and later shrink,
change the format to .ico to make
the favicon.
Favicon generators
There are several favicon generators
which can help you get the things
done more easily, from any image
by shrinking them evenly to make
an image of 16 x 16 pixels size in .ico
format.
Below are a few easy-to-use ones -
Dynamic Drive Favicon
Generator
Favicon.cc
Favicon Generator online tool
Now, here is how you can use the
favicon in your website or blog -
Upload the favicon file to the server
of your blog, to the root of the
domain. i.e. yourblog.com/ and not
anywhere else inside the folders. If
you upload it somewhere else, that
would end up not showing the
favicon when needed.
Now, insert the following code in
the theme files of yours, in the
HEAD section -
Here is how to place the code in
blogger.com blog -
1. Sign in to your Blogger account.
2. Click Layouts
3. Click “edit HTML” tab
4. Scroll down through the code to
“< data:blog.pageTitle/>”
5. Paste the code right under this
title tag.
6. Publish your blog.
The favicon would appear in the
browsers like Firefox after few
refreshes, but Internet explorer
would miss showing the favicon
sometimes due to some bug in the
browser.