Sometimes in blogging, it is the little things that matter. Attention to detail is crucial in blogging and writing. One of the little details that sometimes gets overlooked in blogging and website development is the favicon.  In this post, I will show you how to add a favicon to your blog and website.

What is a Favicon?

Maybe you have never noticed it, but web browsers show a little image in the browser tab next to the name of the blog or website you are visiting. This is called the “favicon.” If the website does not have a favicon, the browser will use it’s own default image.

On all of my blogs, I use the Standard Theme, and it comes with it’s own default favicon, which is a little black box with an “S.” inside it.

In this post, I will change my favicon.

Create a Favicon

The first thing to do is create a favicon. You can use your favorite image editor to do this, or you can use a favicon generator tool. The tool is kind of cool because you can make animated favicons as well. I use Photoshop and then create the icon using the methods described below.

Whichever way you create a favicon, make sure you make the image square, and don’t include too much detail. The image will eventually be tiny, only 16 x 16 pixels, and this doesn’t leave much room for detailed works of art. Make sure you save it as *.jpg or *.png

However, I usually start out with an image that is 100 x 100 pixels so that I can work with it, and then I shrink it down later. Also, creating an image of this size allows me to use it for a thumbnail later if I want, such as for a Gravatar.

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I use the Standard Theme on all my blogs, and it is also used by popular authors and speakers like Michael Hyatt, President and CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, Frank Viola, popular author and speaker, and Tony Morgan, a sought-after church consultant.

The fact that it is called “Standard Theme” does not mean it is basic, but means it is the standard by which all other blog themes are measured. In my use of this them, I have found this claim to be true. It is the best WordPress theme on the market, and it is getting better all the time!

Here are eight reasons why I use the Standard Theme:

1. Blog pages load much faster. The code is tighter and better written than free themes, and therefore, the blog loads much faster. Not only do blog readers love this, but search engines rank pages higher which load faster.
2. Standard Theme is SEO Optimized. Don’t know much about SEO (Search Engine Optimization)? That’s okay! Standard Theme built all the best optimization right in, so you can focus on what you do best: writing great blog posts. Free Themes are never optimized for search engines, which means search engines have trouble finding and indexing your pages, and if you do optimize your blog, you have do it all yourself.
3. Easy blog administration. The Standard Theme user interface is so easy to use. The options are written in plain English, and
4. Need fewer plugins, and those you do use work flawlessly. Free themes usually come with no extra options, and so you have to install dozens of WordPress plugins to get the functionality you need out of your blog. Even more aggravating, sometimes these plugins do not work right with your theme! The Standard Theme has coded most of the popular plugin features right into their theme, so you don’t have to install them, and better yet, if/when you do install a plugin, it works seamlessly and flawlessly with your blog.
5. Easy sharing on social networks. One of the best ways to build readership and blog traffic is through popular social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and StumbleUpon. Standard Theme comes with a beautiful sidebar slider built right in which helps you and your readers connect your content to the social web.
6. Lifetime support and upgrades! Let’s see any other Free or Premium theme offer this! The Standard Theme has two options for buying. If you get the more expensive option, you get free, lifetime access to the help forums where the developers of the Theme answer your questions, and any time a new version of Standard Theme comes out, you get to upgrade…for FREE!
7. Install on numerous websites. If you own numerous websites like I do, most premium themes make you buy the theme for every website you want to install it on. Not Standard Theme. Once you buy it, you can install it on every website you own.
8. Generous Affiliate Program. Some people don’t want the expense of buying a premium theme. But the Standard Theme allows you to make your money back by joining their generous affiliate program. After you buy the theme, if you sign up for their affiliate program, you will make all your money back after only two sales! Just two!

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On my post, Burn a Feed at Feedburner, UnkleE from Is There a God? asked some great questions about RSS feeds and how to actually implement them on your blog. He pointed out, rightly so, that while I had a post about burning a feed at Feedburner, I never actually explained what a Feed was or how to use it on your blog.

So, here is a post that will hopefully clear some of that up. Let’s start with the basics:

What is RSS?

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication.”

Did that help you understand what RSS is? I didn’t think so….

Sometimes you will hear people talk about their “Feed.” This is the same thing as their “RSS.” Frequently, you will also hear the terms combined, and people will speak of their “RSS Feed.”

Essentially, an RSS Feed is nothing more than a different way for people to read your blog. Having an RSS Feed allows people to read your blog posts without having to actually come visit your blog. That is what the term “syndication” means. In the publishing world, a “syndicated” column appears in numerous places and in numerous formats. The RSS Feed allows your blog posts to get “syndicated” so that people can read your blog posts where they want, how they want, and when they want.

There are numerous ways for people to use your RSS Feed to get your blog posts. For example, they can get them by email, in a Feed Reader such as Google Reader, or in a Feed Aggregator like iGoogle.
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Have you written a killer post, which you scheduled to get posted at the perfect time, and then a few hours after it was supposed to be posted, you got online, only to find out that the article never got posted?

Frustrated, you went and checked your post drafts section of WordPress, and saw the following error:

When scheduled posts are written to go “live” at a certain time, this is not the error you want to see.

Tragically, this has been happening to me recently on some of my blogs. While the easy fix is just to immediately publish the post, this doesn’t work if you are going to be away from the computer for a few days or a week or more, and want to schedule posts in advance.

Recently, I was planning on taking a week break from blogging, but still wanted articles to get posted every day. So I had to write and schedule them in advance. However, none of my schedules articles were actually getting posted. Instead, they kept getting the “missed schedule” error.

So I wasted about six hours trying to find out what was wrong. I went through the usual steps, and uninstalled all my plugins, re-installed WordPress, searched the help forums, and everything else I could think of. I found lots of people who had similar problems, but nobody had a real solution.

Finally, I figured it out, and although you may not be dealing with the problem, I am writing a post about how I fixed it just so that if this ever happens to me again, I don’t have to waste hours of my time trying to remember what I did.
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Google+ is the next big social networking site. I am now getting more comments on my blog posts on Google+ than I am on Facebook.

So it is important for you to make sure you send snippets of your blog posts to Google+ which will invite people to read your posts and interact with you about them.

You should have already included the Google+ button on your sharebar. That is a start, and you could just leave it at that. But notice in the image below that when I click on the button, it pulls the wrong image for the post, and a non-customized description.

I want a little more control than that. Here is a post explaining how.

Ultimately what we need to do is add OpenGraph Meta data to our blog posts. The nice thing is that Facebook uses this meta data also for sharing posts on Facebook.

There are two ways of adding the OpenGraph meta data. The first is that you can hard code it into your blog header. The second option, which I use, is to let a plugin do most of the coding for me. I use WordPress SEO.

But I will show you both methods, just in case you want to know how, or in case you don’t use that plugin.

Hardcode OpenGraph Meta Data

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People love pictures of people. I don’t know what it is psychologically, but people always prefer blogs and blog posts with pictures of people on them, than pictures of flowers, mountains, or dogs. Well, unless it’s puppies,… then people may prefer the puppies.

But you get the point, pictures…any pictures at all…are better than no pictures, and pictures of people are best of all. And you, as the author of your blog, should think about putting your smiling mugshot right on the front page. It creates an instant connection with your readers. Unless your scary looking. Then maybe you should leave it off… unless, of course, you have a scary blog….

Back on topic…here is a post about how to add your face to your sidebar. And I want to thank Brantley Davidson for raising this question to me in an email. You should go check out his blog too. I am excited about what he is blogging about: Technology Translation. Have you ever struggled with questions about technology? I have. Just tonight I tried to explain the differences between Facebook and Google+ to my wife. She did not understand, because I did a poor job explaining. From the way things look, Brantley is going to do a great job translating technology for us.

But on with how to add a picture of yourself to the Standard Theme sidebar (or any other theme as well).
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