RSS Feeds and Favicons / J, Colannino

Well, I have just syndicated my blog using FeedBurner.com. The funny orange icon at the left of my blog will take you there. Once you get there you will see a “Subscribe Now” banner at the top right, under which appears icons for a variety of feed readers. Click the one you own, and voila, your subscribed. Here’s how I did it.

First, I went to the FeedBurner.com website. Then I followed the instructions. After completing the exercise it generated html code and asked me to past it intomy template. Blogger's html editor makes it almost impossible to show you the actual code, so I've omitted it.

You can paste the code anywhere in your template, but I had problems with the icon appearing at the very top of my blog where it was covered by the blogsites top banner. The best place seemed to be after the “End Profile” comment between the *h2 and */h2* headers near the bottom of Blogger's template code. That puts the orange icon right under the “View my complete profile” link in the sidebar at the left.

Our professor also showed us a cool link which ultimately led to myfavicon.com. There you can personalize your site’s favicon by uploading any digital picture you happen to like. If your browser supports it, you will see my happy little mugshot in icon form when you bookmark my site. If you follow the sites instructions, you can upload any digital image and it will generate two snippets of code. Again, I cannot show you the code, but the first snippet must be pasted somewhere after the *head* tag at the top of the template’s html code (I am using asterisks as the delimiters because the usual ones mess up the editor). The second snippet can go anywhere, but as I have said in the first paragraph, I found that the best place was between the *h2 and */h2* lines. In fact, I pasted the second snippet right after the FeedBurner.com code.

That resulted in the icon that looks like a small multi-color basket weave at left. Again, the site gave me the html code verbatim.

Now I can hardly wait to take a class in html programming!