Dropbox is a fantastic service. I use it regularly to sync files between my desktop and laptop. It does have other uses though, like sharing files with your friends and even hosting a website. While I would not recommend you host your main business website with a Public shared folder using Dropbox, using the service to host some images, like your websites favicon, has some advantages.

If you are using a service such as Blogger and want to add your own custom favicon you have several choices of where to host your favicon. You can upload it and host it on Google’s server, although last time I tried they did not accept the .ico format. That works until you want to change your favicon then you have to do it all over again including updating your code that points to your favicon.

You could host your favicon on an image hosting service, but then they might delete it at anytime. Again if you want to change your favicon you will be redoing all of the code.

Since Dropbox can host files that are publically accessable on the Internet you now have another option. Following the tips and tricks wiki to making your own website you can simple create a folder for your favicon, and copy your favicon into that folder. The advantage of hosting your favicon in your Dropbox public folder means you have more control over it. If you decide to change your favicon all you need to do is simply copy over your existing favicon and it will be replaced on your website. You don’t have to redo the code pointing to it, and you never have to worry about an image hosting service deleting it.

If you have not tried Dropbox, you really should give it a serious look. They offer 2gb of space for free, which is more than enough to share and sync files between computers.

They also have a great favicon if you are looking for some inspiration.

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.

I am a freelancer and one of the tasks that I have to admit I am not very good at is invoicing. Sure I keep good track of my time and projects, but I was often behind on my invoicing. A few months ago I made the switch from desktop invoicing software to Cashboard, and I have to tell you it has made a world of difference. Not only can I keep track of my project, time and invoicing all in one spot, but I can schedule my recurring invoices to be sent out regularly.

What does any of that have to do with a favicon website and blog? Well nothing really except they also have a great favicon.

Their favicon comes from their logo and does a great job of branding their website and their twitter account. It also gives you a great idea of what the service does and makes it easy to recoginize.

If you are looking for a great online invoicing service I do recommend Cashboard, and not just because I like their favicon.

How to Add Your Favicon to Blogger is by far the most popular post on this blog. If you read through the comments you will notice that for some people it works perfectly and for others they seem to have a tough time getting it to work. The reality is that adding a favicon to a Blogger.com blog is a bit of a hack. Hacks sometimes break and do not always work for all web browsers. This is currently the case with adding a favicon to a Blogger.com blog hosted on Blogspot for Internet Explorer.

For those of you wanting desperately to have your favicon to work in Internet Explorer you have to use a .ico file, since it appears that Internet Explorer simply does not want to support the .png or other formats for the favicon. You can’t upload a .ico file to Blogger.com, that means you will need to host your favicon somewhere other that on Blogger.com. An option could be Google Page Creator.

You still need to insert the code just before the closing head tag. You code then would look something like this:

<link href='http://www.example.com/favicon.ico' rel='shortcut icon'/>
</head>

The code is currently installed on the Free Favicon Blogger test blog and it is showing in Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Xp Pro. If it does not work for you leave a comment and we will see if it can be sorted out.

If you don’t have a favicon Google could be giving you one great big reason to get one. They recently started testing using favicons in the search results. This was first mentioned on January 25 on Search Engine Roundtable. It was later confirmed on the Google Groups Help.

When I tried it I could not get it to work, so I cannot confirm or deny that this is true. Below is the screenshot that was available from Search Engine Roundtable to give you an idea of what to look out for.

I read about this over at Search Engine Land.

If you are lucky enough to see take a screenshot and leave a comment with a link to the image so we can all take a look.

If this does not motivate you to get a favicon, I don’t know what will.