How to add a personalized favicon (favorite icon) to your Blogger blog

How to add a personalized favicon (favorite icon) to your Blogger blog

I'm looking to create a nice little createandbreak icon for this blog. Maybe a little hammer icon or a screw driver perhaps. I'll start with just a hammer. I tried a screw-driver crossing a hammer, but that looked too much like an icon for "tools and options." That and it's hard to manually do the anti-aliasing by hand (okay not too hard, just time-consuming).

I made the following with paint shop pro (version 8.10, mind you) just drawing around in the bitmap of a 16x16 256 colored image. I did use one of their preset gradients, but besides that, it's all me!

Not super cool just yet, but I'll keep at it. At least it's my very own icon. (You can even tell by searching for "hammer icon" and seeing the definitely more professional icons out there)

Here it is in-action in Firefox (2):


Not showing up in IE7 yet-possibly because it's the wrong format (gif instead of .ico). I set it as a favorite, but maybe it takes something else to make it work.

The fun things about bitmaps is the illusion anti-aliasing does.

Maybe I can pick better color-choices, but look at how "crude" the actual pixels look zoomed in.



I picked up this drawing "skill" back when I tried to make bitmaps of the USS Enterprise using just MS Paint. I found that filling in the corners with differing shades of grays and colors made that blending effect. So instead of jagged lines, we get nice anti-aliased diagonals and curves. Basically brightered colors seem to be bigger while darker colors seemed to make things shrink.

It kind of blew me away the first time I saw a program do such lines in real-time. If it wasn't for old school MS Paint and other basic draw programs, we'd take it for granted that angled lines just look "normal."