*From Wikipedia.com

*Wikipedia Commons

Finding a Favicon (usually called favicon.ico) of a Website is sometimes difficult.  There are various legitimate reasons why you might need to find these particular icons and a simple Google Search typically doesn’t turn up “good” answers to this question.

Favicons are the little icons that you see in the address bar (or RSS Feed) of a Website when it is loaded (or in your “favorites” Website lists).  You can see https://mustech.net‘s Favicon in your browser above (It’s an Earth with Headphones).

Many Websites will pull in offered RSS Feeds for inclusion on their pages. When these Favicons do not appear, often the Website looks disjunct or shows the infamous “SQUARE X” box indicating something should be there, but it is not.   An example of a site that pulls in (or aggregates) Music Education Feeds is our own MusicEdNews.Com site.  You can see many Favicons associated with their parent Websites by viewing the MusicEdNews site.

The easiest way I’ve found to find a Favicon directly is by using a particular kind of Google Search.  Copy and paste this URL (or click it) into your browser and press the ENTER key: http://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=mustech.net .  You will see a new blank page only showing the Favicon of that particular Website.

This unique Google search will directly pull up the associated Faviconof whatever site you put after the “?domain=”  string.  Try it; change it to http://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=musicednews.com. You will see the MusicEdNews.com favicon now…

An alternative to this is to use this very efficient Favicon Search Site: http://www.getfavicon.org/ .  This site is very easy to use and no explanition is need in order to utilize it.

If you don’t have a Faviconfor your site, you can make some very basic Faviconsonline or upload a graphic to be convereted into a Favicon.  Here are a few sites that allow you make Favicons:

  1. http://antifavicon.com/
  2. http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon/
  3. http://www.favicon.cc/

Once you make a Favicon, copy it to the root directory of your Website and/or any of your theme directories.  After you accomplish this, you should start seeing your Favicon appear on your own Website(s).  Please note that these icons are almost always to be named favicon.ico.  However, you may see these sometimes named as favicon.jpg, favicon.png, favicon.gif, etc.

Good Luck and Happy Favicon-ing!

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