Favicons in Google Reader

I have been using Google Reader as my feed reader for a couple years now. It works well, but it is difficult to to find the feed you to read sometimes because they all tend to blend together. Well not anymore. Google announced on the Google Reader blog that Google Reader was now going to show websites favicons beside the feed.

If you have been holding off to create your own favicon, now you have another reason to create a favicon to help your RSS stand out in Google Reader.

favicons

The Gremlins Did It!

Well things had been running smoothly until we noticed that for some reason the favicon.ico file was not properly being created. You might have noticed that your favicon.ico file had a file size of 0kb. Opps, sorry about that. For some reason the code that created the favicon.ico file started to malfunction. I think the gremlins did it. It appears to be working properly again, but if anyone has a problem with 0kb files being created let me know and I will take a look and see what the gremlins were up to on the code.

Matt Cutts Gets a New Favicon

This might not be as big of news as Google getting a new favicon, but Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Google’s Webspam team decided to change his favicon. His previous one was well, interesting. I grabbed this snapshot of it from the Internet Wayback Machine from December 2006, so it might not be the one he was using just before this recent change. Mattcutts old favicon

As you can see from this screenshot Matt Cutts new favicon he has gone with a favicon that uses his initials, and a green that matches the green from his blog. It is nice to see he made a change and the new favicon at least has some meaning to his website, so if you bookmark it you have an idea of who’s website you might be visiting.

If you like to keep up on Google Matt Cutts blog is a good source of information about Google, although it is not an official source of Google news, he often talks about many of the different Google products and how to use them better.

Free Favicon – The Blog

Welcome to the Free Favicon blog! Here we will highlight different tutorials on how to create a great looking favicon for your website, how to add it to your website, talk and highlight great looking favicons from around the Internet and most importantly we plan on allowing you to show off your great favicon. We are stll dusting around here so there is sure to be changes in the coming days and weeks as we get things in order, but feel free to subscribe to keep up with the latest about favicons.

Favicons have become more than just a 16 x 16 pixel image in your web browser of your favourite website, they have become branding and marketing symbols that help people identify with your website. This can be seen most recently with Google’s changing of their favicon from the classic capital G to the new lower case g. Google has made small changes to their homepage over the years, but the change to their favicon has people talking. Google’s favicon has become their brand. There has even been rumors that Google might be looking at changing their logo and the favicon change was the first of a series of changes. What ever might happen it is clear that Google favicon equals their brand on the Internet.

All the more reason you need to find and create that perfect favicon for your website.