Q: How do I make an icon for my website that will show up in the address bar?

A: This is called a FavIcon.

favicon.ico in the main directory,a 16x16, 16 or 256 colour Microsoft icon file

Mozilla/Firefox and most other supported browsers will start displaying the favicon on the browser address bar, the very first time you visit a web page that has a favicon (specified using the favicon HTML tag).

The file doesn't *have* to be named favicon.ico but it does let you tie into the way some browsers automatically look for that file. you can specify a file of any filename.ico with the link ref:

< LINK REL="shortcut icon" HREF="http://site/directory/filename.ico" >

Internet Explorer browsers (as of version 6.x) associate favicons with bookmarks. So you must first bookmark the web page. The favicon will appear on the browser address bar and on the Favorites menu, the second time you visit the bookmarked page. If the favicon doesn't appear even after bookmarking and revisiting the web page, restarting the browser may help.

http://www.chami.com/html-kit/services/favicon/
is an online tool for making any image into a FavIcon.

Penguicon Report

I had a good time at Penguicon!

Cory Doctorow and his girlfriend Alice Taylor were both very cool. I was Cory's liaison and they were fun to hang out with and very easy to take care of. Cory works for the EFF and also helps run boingboing.net and has a few science fiction novels and short stories out. Alice is a games researcher for the BBC... very cool, and very sweet. I took them to the Henry Ford Museum on Friday, which was very interesting, especially for Cory's running commentary on everything and his many side stories. Alice is british, so she found many things particularly bizarre. I hadn't realized how big the place had gotten, with how many buildings pulled from completely different places to become part of Greenfield Village.

During the con, Cory gave lots of talks about open source, creative commons and the history of copyright and implications for digital media rights. His keynote speech was really great. It reminded me of the heady days of the EFF blue ribbon campaign, back when a lot of us had just recently started having web pages and we put blue ribbons on them and wrote to our representatives and we defeated the Communications Decency Act and it felt very radical and rebellious.

And I met Nat Torkington, of O'Reilly, who also seems quite neat. I didn't really talk to him until the last day, which was too bad, but he and Alice and Cory and I had a really interesting conversation about how to get more women involved in Open Source and computing conventions that I hope we'll pick up again at some other time.

( cut 'cause this turned out to be very long... )

One thing that didn't go as well as hoped was the charity auction, so you should all go donate to the Electronic Frontier Foundation so they can keep working to protect your digital liberty.

I didn't take very many pictures, so please let me know if you have some or see some posted. Thanks!