The Last Word: Why not use favicons?

Please note that my blog has changed addresses! It's all new and improved. Hence this old friend of mine had to be left alone. You can visit me at The Last Word (beta). It's all warmed up for you! :)

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This is just one of those things which really bugs me sometimes. People go to the biggest lengths to modify and customise their pages. Make them look absolutely stunning. Add worldfuls of information on them. Basically, make them the perfect web pages people would like to come and see. But they miss one small detail, and it makes life that much harder.

Ever opened a bunch of tabs in one go, and suddenly become confused as to which tab belonged to which page? If you're the compulsive tabbed browser (like me), you'll suddenly find yourself with 20 tabs, and no title visible on them. Just the Firefox page icon to choose your tab. It takes nothing short of a miracle to hit the exact tab that you want to see the first time around. Why? Because you can't make out which tab belongs to which page! So here is something that should help all you first time bloggers/web-pagers to make a unique identity for your page. Add these two lines right below your <head> tag:

<link href=" " rel="image/x-icon"> <link rel="shortcut icon" href=" " type="image/x-icon">

Replace those two glaring blanks with the path to your image which you want to display as your page's icon. On this blog, its that little orange guitar icon which I link from my photoblog (another one of the ingenious ways of breaking into Google's servers! :-P). The picture linked here can be in any format for the web, but preferrably GIF, JPEG or PNG to speed up loading.

This icon also shows up in the bookmarks if/when you bookmark the page. The perfect to setup a colourful identity for your page!

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4 Comments

I don't yet have a favicon on my blog for one simple reason -- I've never decided on a graphic that I like. I'm not graphic artist and that's that, hehe.

Singpolyma, on Mon Jun 05, 02:16:00 AM

Haha! You think Techcrunch's icon is a work of art? Its just a simple TC. It doesn't have to be anything fancy. You can do a Google Image search and pick one from there! It just makes life a little bit simpler for us regular 20 tab surfers!

Aditya, on Mon Jun 05, 03:03:00 AM

I have the lamest favicon ever...but I suppose it does the job. Trying to come up with anything that looks good in that itty bitty space is difficult.