Yesterday I was looking at my default image icon for my twitter & flickr accounts and decided I had to do something about it. So, using the flickr I searched for some creative commons images. I ended up liking this image: by Leo Reynolds.

Uploading it to Twitter and such was easy enough, and I went so far as to sign up for a Gravatar (though I don’t know if/when that will be used).

Today, I noticed that my theme had not come with a favicon – one of those little icons that show up when you bookmark a website, next to the title of the website on a tab, or next to the website URL in the address bar. Since I had conveniently just chosen an image to use for my logins on other websites, I thought it would work out well for my blog as well.

So, I opened up Gimp (no Photoshop here in the UNIX lab), and went about creating my favicon. Fairly simple stuff, all I really wanted to do was delete the background in favor of transparency, and cut out the extra space around the sides of the leftover image. I did a quick Google search for “png to ico” and found ConvertICO. After uploading the .ico file to my /public_html folder, I then had to delve into WordPress to figure out where to add the bit of HTML to incorporate my favicon into the site.

~/public_html/wp-content/thems/clockwork/header/

From there, I added one line of HTML to the header-default.php:

<link rel="shortcut icon" type="image/ico" href="favicon.ico">

And that was that! ..until I remembered that my theme also had one other peculiarity — there was no link to the “admin” features of my site (the wp-admin section where you manage your blog), so I figured now would be as good a time as any to add that. That was more simple, as I had already located the default header file, and only needed to add in a bit of code for the link.

So, yeah. favicons & HTML. fun stuff.