The other day I was deleting some old bookmarks from Firefox and wondered why my site link had a little empty box rather than a fancy little icon. A bit of research explained that this icon was a favicon.

So I used Gimp to make a little 16×16 graphic then saved it as a ico file and as png and bmp just in case I wanted to do something else with it later. Sounds easy so far but it must have taken over an hour to get to this point. It took me ages to come up with something that small. I tried text and simple geometric patterns but they all looked like crap. I wanted it to be simple but recognisable.

It was easy enough to ftp the file to the web site and modify the index file to add the favicon to the header. It worked.

Next I wondered about WordPress. Some more research and I uploaded the favicon.ico file to the WordPress root directory and to the actve theme directory. This should have been enough, but it didn’t work. There was an option in the there settings area to specify a favicon. The search for a file option didn’t work so I entered the path and file name. That worked as much as it shows up in the tab and address bar but only for the main page. OK for now.

Favicon 1