A Little Bit More Fun» Technology & the Internet

Adding Favicons to WordPress or Joomla

Beth Hood — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 17:34:18 +0000

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:

(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”:

4. Then be sure to upload your favicon.ico file to the images folder for the theme.

5. Refresh you page and it should be there. Sometimes it takes a little while to appear. You may also need to clear your cache before it comes up.

Adding a favicon to your Joomla site:

1. Follow the same steps to create your favicon.ico image as above.

2. Usually the code for the favicon is already placed in the Joomla index.php file, but here it is in case you want to verify:

This should be located before .

3. You simply need to replace the favicon image in the images folder with your new image. (I got a little confused by this and tried putting it in the templates image folder, but then realized it needs to go in the main “images” folder). If you are using the Joomla control panel you can simply add it through the media manager.

4. Refresh your site and the favicon should be there. Once again, mine took a few minutes to come up. I thought I had failed and was beginning to give up, and then all of a sudden it just appeared!

I’m still learning about why the favicon works in some web browsers and not others. For example Safari works like a charm immediately, but I still can’t see my favicons in Firefox yet (on a Mac). If I learn any tricks about this, I’ll pass it along. Anyway, the point of posting this techie-related entry is quite simply because favicons make web browsing a little bit more fun!

Tsunami Warning in Hawaii

Beth Hood — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 02:16:50 +0000

Ok, so tsunami warnings don’t exactly make life a little bit more fun, but they did make our Saturday morning quite a bit more exciting as we tried to figure out if we were outside of the evacuation zone. Turns out that we were out of the evacuation zone according to the phone book, but just barely, which made us wonder how generous the zone is and what if it was a “little” off? Should we be worried? We did what we could and prepared extra water and food in case we were out of power for a few days. And then we sat around and waited with the rest of the islands, for what turned out to be a much smaller event than they anticipated.

What did make the tsunami warning a little bit more fun were all the friends and family we heard from across the country, reaching out over phone, text, and Facebook to make sure we were safe. Ahh…we felt loved! Since we had to stay home, Jim did what he did best in times of emergency and made some delicious blueberry waffles, and certainly waffles make tsunami warnings a little bit more fun. Not to mention whales. Prepared with our binoculars for some wave action from our stadium seating of the ocean, we did have a chance to watch whales surfacing and flitting around in the water for a couple of hours.

Technology also makes potential disasters a little bit more fun. We have no cable television and no batteries for our radio, so our connection to what was happening on the island was through our computer. We listened to KBIG broadcast on the web and watched scenes of the Hilo Bay Front over the Internet as well. We were able to update our Facebook status to give immediate relief to anyone who was worried. And having this technology really helped us feel connected to what was happening locally and nationally.

And one more shout out to technology: I truly appreciated how incredibly lucky we are to have the detection and warning systems in place through the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center. The fact that we had so much warning to prepare for an event like this made it seem surreal, especially in the aftermath of the Haiti disaster and the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami.

What to do When You Get your Cell Phone Wet

Beth Hood — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 20:48:48 +0000

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.