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.
How to Add Your Favicon to Blogger Update
Google/Blogger broke the instructions in the previous post about how to add your own favicon to a blogspot blog by adding some HTML that referenced the Blogger.com favicon instead. Fortunately the fix for this is relatively simple. Here is what has happened.
Blogger.com has added their own HTML to the templates near the top referencing their favicon. It looks like this if you look at the source code.
<link href='http://www.blogger.com/favicon.ico' rel='icon' type='image/vnd.microsoft.icon'/>
The instructions on How to Add Your Favicon to Blogger in step three says to add your own HTML code referencing your favicon right below the <head> tag. The web browser however will use the last reference so the Blogger.com favicon code was coming later on. The fix for this is to place your favicon code just before the closing <head> tag that looks like this: </head>.
Your code referencing your custom favicon then overrides the Google/Blogger.com code for the favicon and your custom favicon will return.
I tested this on the Free Favicon Blogspot blog and the favicon has returned. Give it a try on your Blogspot blog and let me know if it works.
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. 
As you can see from this screenshot 
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.
Blogger Favicon Showdown
I wanted to do something fun this week and let you decide which popular blogger has the best favicon.
Shoemoney
Shoemoney’s favicon is a scaled down version of his logo and it shows up really well considering the small size of the favicon. It certainly helps to brand his blog.
Problogger
Problogger’s favicon changed when he got the blog design redone last year. The new logo and favicon complement each other and help with the his branding. You can easily see the P and the Ubuntu style circle and dots on your address bar or tabs when you are on the Problogger site making it easy to find in the tabs when you are looking for it.
John Chow
John Chow’s favicon is a picture of half of his face. Considering the small size and how little space there is the favicon does appear to resemble him. I would guess there was a little Photoshop work done to make his favicon appear that clear but they did a good job. I am a little surprised it does not match his blog more, but in many ways his face is his logo.
Daily Blog Tips
Daniel Scocco runs Daily Blog Tips a popular blogging tips blog. The Daily Blog Tips favicon clearly draws its inspiration from their blog name taking out the DBT. Considering the small space it works not to bad, although it does appear to be a little blurry to me.
Now it is your turn. Vote in our poll and help determine which popular blogger has the best favicon!
{democracy:2}
Defender of the Favicon!
Favicons have gone from being just a graphic or an animated graphic to full fledged games thanks to Mathieu Henri who has created “Defender of the Favicon“. This favicon is a little different than the ones you will find here at FreeFavicon.com. The favicon is actually a Javascript that dynamically updates the favicon. It is playable but not viewable in all browsers. The best browsers to try the favicon game in are Opera 9.5, Opera 9.2 and FireFox 2. I was using Firefox 3 and it was working alright, other than the fact that I suck at Defender.
I was trying the site out in Firefox 3 on Ubuntu and it appeared to run fine. I also tried it on Firefox 2 on a Windows XP machine and it was pretty much identical. I could only ever play in the favicon. The instructions say that if you press Enter it should open in a canvas display but I could not get that to work on either machine.
Here is a short video of me trying to play Defender of the Favicon. Not easy to do but it is a creative use of the space. Perhaps a different game would be eaiser to play as a favicon. Pac-Man comes to mind or even Asteroids maybe.
This is a unique approach to creating a favicon and deserves to be recognized this week as the favicon of the week!