As Gravatar has been having server issues for the last few months as mentioned in an interview with the creator on The Wordpress Podcast and Rhys has been going on about them I’ve had a look into Favatars, but first of course you need a favicon! This post is here to teach you how to make favicons.
Because I know the majority of my readers are windoze users I will be covering both windows and mac ways of doing things, but there wont be any windoze screen shots I’m afraid.
Firstly, Making Favicons on a Mac.
note: this plugin also works on Windows :)
If you have photoshop, download the donationware plugin by Telegraphics here copy the .plugin file to Macintosh HD:Applications:Adobe Photoshop CS2:Plug ins Then load photoshop.
Open a new 16 by 16 image and create your little favicon, I’ve heard some people say its easier to do 32 by 32 and then rescale, so if you would rather do that feel free. Once you’ve got your image go to file save as type in the name favicon and be sure to select ico from the drop down filetype list.
Alternatively if you dont have Photoshop, create the icon in your graphics program of choice and save it as a .bmp, then download the shareware program Graphic Convertor and under the picture menu click colour, select 4-bit (16 colours). Save the file as a ico (windows icon).
Making Favicons on Windows
The way I’ve always done it is to use IconEdit32. Its a very nifty little program. Create your icon (remember 16 by 16) and save as an ico file.
Once you have your .ico file upload it to your root directory, /pubic_html on an apache server, and add these lines of code between your head tag.
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://domain.ext/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />
<link rel="icon" href="http://domain.ext/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />
Now if you use wordpress download the favicon plugin and have fun :)
Incidently if you know who made the strawberry on my favicon, please do say. I would credit the site I got it from but it was a xanga site and we all know what they’re like dont we ;)
If you’re still looking for the source of your favicon, it’s here: http://homepage3.nifty.com/miu_factory
I think mother earth made the strawberry, but who designed it? Don’t know. Besides that, it’s a beautiful favicon.
In case you want some Windows screencaps, let me know. I’ll make them for you.
Greets from Belgium
awww. for both windoze and mac? that’s sho sweet. meh, wants they get le internet installed in ma byooteeful penthouze apartement, i’ma so do teh whole favicon thingie. and the challenge thingie. spam’s a shitterhouser.
sorry for the mispellings and weird wordies, i’m going through a spazztastic moment of dyslexia.
Very useful article hun ;)