Adding a FavIcon to your WordPress.Com Blog!

01Jun09

WordPress.com blogs have always lacked the feature of adding a custom favicon to a blog, which minimizes the possible level of customization. For those who don’t know what a favicon is, it’s the logo or picture you see next to the name of the website in your browser’s location (address) bar or tab bar. For example, the default WordPress.com favicon is a big white W in a blue circle with a drop shadow.

But to change that, WordPress has come up with a new and brilliant idea: Blavatars!!! “Blavatar” stands for Blog + Avatar, so it’s a picture that you upload through your blog’s dashboard that counts as your avatar when you comment on other blogs or they link to you, and also as the favicon on your blog (after the neccessaary cropping.) How cool is that?

To get started, sign in to WordPress.com and select the blog you want to change the favicon for out of the My Dashboards panel at the top of any WordPress.com page. Then on the left hand side of the page scroll down until you reach the Settings panel, and click Settings –> General. On the right of the new page, you will see a “Blog Picture” panel where you can upload or remove your Blavatar. Once you upload a jpg or png, you can crop it to the necessary amount for it to be a valid favicon. For example, I uploaded a 16 by 16 pixels favicon with the intersecting characters A, 2, and N, but I will try to see if uploading a larger rendition will help with the “avatar” part.

So, try it out, this feature is awesome!

-Maximz2005


Filed under: Technology, Web, tips   |  1 Comment
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,