I’ve admired those sweet little images to the left of the url for so long, thinking it was simply out my league to add a favicon to my sites. It turns out it’s actually quite simple. Naturally I chose the beach ball and love what it does for the look of my site, not to mention how much easier it is to find the site when I have 10 tabs open at the same time!

Here are instructions for adding a favicon to WordPress:

1. The most fun part is deciding what you want your image to be (make sure you are using a royalty-free image), then you simply need to resize it to 16 by 16 pixels in your favorite image editor (I use Photoshop) using a GIF or PNG format. Convert your image into a favicon.ico. (I’ve simply done this by renaming the image before I upload it through my FTP program.)

2. Add the following code to your header.php file of your wordpress blog:

<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”favicon.ico”>

(You will need to be sure to clear the smart quotes from this code. I usually use a simple text editor to copy and paste the code from a blog, before I copy and paste it into my own site to make sure it cleans it up.)

3. If you are using the theme Thesis for WordPress (which is what I use), you won’t be able to find your header.php file. Instead you need to go into Thesis Site Options from your Dashboard and add this to the field called “Additional Scripts”:

<link rel=”shortcut icon” type=”image/ico” href=”favicon.ico”>

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Well this was definitely a first for us. We had a picnic the night before and I had tucked Jim’s cell phone in the side pouch of our soft LLBean cooler to keep it safe. Then the next morning I was draining some of the water out of the cooler over the sink, when I heard a “plop!”, saw a foreign object in the dishwater, and upon registering that it was his phone instantaneously scooped it out!

I must say I was impressed by my reflexes. Jim wasn’t quite as impressed when he realized that it was his phone (I was relieved since my phone is an iphone and would be much more costly to replace than his 2 year old motorola and probably wouldn’t have survived).

Anyway, here’s what he did next: 1. Turned the phone off. 2. Took the battery out immediately. 3. Set the phone outside on the hot car under the sun. That’s all. A few hours later, he checked and it was working fine. Granted ours only took a quick dip, but was a good lesson to learn, and I hope it saves a few cell phones or marriages down the road.

By the way, if you spill water on your laptop, you’ll also want to take the battery out right away, then tent the laptop so it looks like an “A” so all the water can drain out. Put it in as dry a place as possible, with a heater. A friend of ours used a hairdryer to initially dry it out, then placed it in a room with a dehumidifier. Her computer worked for another year after this. Another friend put her laptop on a low heat setting in the oven! If you are able to save your computer from water spillage, please don’t make the mistake of neglecting to back up your entire system in case it poops out shortly after.