John Chow did a review the other day on JohnChow.com for MaxBlogPress. They paid $500 for the review so they can promote their new plugin that will easily add a FavIcon to your WordPress Blog. Here’s the review: MaxBlogPress Makes Favicons Even Easier
I realize that they did the review to gain exposure to their site in general and not only this new plugin but I still question the value of the plugin. Plugins definitely make things easier in a lot of cases but is this one of them? Maybe I know less about FavIcons then I think. Well, here are the steps to add a FavIcon to your WordPress blog without a plugin.
- Find an image that you would like to use. The end result will be better if it is a square image so that there won’t be any stretching or skewing. Save the image to your desktop for easy access.
- Go to http://www.html-kit.com/favicon/ to get the image converted to an ICO file.
- Click Browse, grab the file, click Generate
- Click Download
- The downloaded file will be in ZIP format. Unzip it. If you aren’t sure how to unzip, go here.
- Upload the favicon.ico file to the root directory on your server. If you aren’t sure how to upload check out this FTP tutorial and use FileZilla as your FTP client. It’s free.
- Add one line of code to the header file in your theme. Details below.
To add the code, go to Presentation, Theme Editor, click Header from the list of files on the right side and add it somewhere between the head tags:
<head>
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />
</head>
Save the file and you’re done. Head over to your homepage and refresh to see if it shows up. You may have to actually bookmark your site to see it.
Have anything to add to this post regarding favicons?
March 29, 2008
Miscellaneous