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[How To] Change The Favicon In Blogger

September 15, 2010September 15, 2010 by bharath

Change default favicon in Blogger

If you have landed here while searching for changing the favicon in blogger, this itself is a indication that you know something about the favicons. Even though I assume that you know a bit about favicons, let me quickly introduce the concept of “favicon” :

Favicon (pronounced fav-eye-con) is the short name for “favorites icon” and is otherwise called as a shortcut icon. It is a 16×16 (most common) or 32×32 pixel square icon that is shown next to the URL of any webpage in a browser that supports tabs like Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera or Internet Explorer 7/8 etc. It is also shown in bookmarks or favorites, when you bookmark (in Firefox, Chrome or Opera) or when you add a site to favorites (in Internet Explorer). Many websites use well designed favicons as branding for their site and it also enables their site to be distinguished from other sites easily.

Wikipedia Favicon

If you are using Blogger blog, you might have already noticed that Blogger shows default favicon next to the URL of your blog as shown here:

Usually if you want to change the favicon of a website, you need to upload the new favicon file to the root folder of the website and the new favicon appears in your website immediately. But it’s not the same case with Blogger. As the user doesn’t have control over the files hosted on Blogger, the only way you can change the favicon in a Blogger blog is to upload that favicon to a free image host that supports uploading of .ico formats and then tell the Blogger to use this favicon instead , by specifying it in a short code inside the HTML source code of your blog template. Let’s look into the step-by-step guide on how to get this done.

Steps:

1. Design an attractive favicon for your site using many online favicon generators online. I’m quoting a few such tools here:

favicon.cc

favicon.co.uk

antifavicon.com

iconj.com

2. Once you have designed and downloaded the favicon on to your desktop, you need to upload it to a host site where you have access to upload the favicon file and retrieve it later. I suggest you try some image hosting sites that allow the uploading of .ico files. Iconj.com mentioned in the above list supports uploading and hosting your .ico files as well.

3. Now note down the URL of the file located on the image host.

4. Login to blogger.com and go to your dashboard. Click on the “Design” tab under your dashboard.

design link in blogger dashboard

5. Now click on “Edit HTML” tab found under the “Design” tab.

Edit Html under design in blogger

6. Find the <head> and </head> lines in the HTML code.

7. Copy the following code:

 <link href='http://www.your-icon-url' rel='shortcut icon' /> 
 <link href='http://www.your-icon-url' rel='icon' />

Replace “www.your-icon-url” in the above code with the actual URL pointing to the new favicon file of your site. Example:

<link href='http://www.techrena.net/favicon.ico’ rel='shortcut icon'/>
<link href='http://www.techrena.net/favicon.ico’rel='icon'/>

8. Paste the modified code anywhere in the HTML code, but it should be placed after the <head> and before </head> section [Tip: Use Ctrl + F to find these lines] in the HTML code. Click “Save Template” to save the changes to the code.

favicon code in blogger html design

9. The new favicon may take some time to appear in your browser. You may not see it until your browser clears its local cache. To see the new favicon instantly, try Ctrl + F5. If it doesn’t show up, try opening your blog in another browser and you will see the change

New favicon

If you liked this post, you might also want to read our earlier exclusive posts about Blogger : How to verify Blogger blog in Webmaster tools, Blogger title tweaks for SEO and swapping Blogger blog title and post title.

Enable Pin To Start Menu For Folders In Windows

April 28, 2010April 28, 2010 by bharath

Pinning items to the start menu is one great way for accessing them more quickly.By default Windows allows only programs to be pinned to the start menu.If you want to add folder to the start menu, follow this simple tutorial which will add “Pin to start menu” context menu option for folders.You can also pin any library to the start menu using this method.

Steps:

1. Open run command by pressing Windows button + R.Type regedit in the filed and click ok.

2. In the Registry editor (regedit), go to the following key:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers

3. Right on the right pane and select New> Key (refer to the screenshot below)

4. Copy and paste {a2a9545d-a0c2-42b4-9708-a0b2badd77c8} as the new key name like we did it in the following screenshot.

5. You are done with the tweak now.Press “SHIFT” key and right-click on any folder, you’ll see a new context menu option “Pin to Start Menu”

if you want to rollback and undo this new change just delete the key that you have just added {a2a9545d-a0c2-42b4-9708-a0b2badd77c8}, which will remove the Pin to Start Menu context menu option from the folders.

If you want to automate the above whole process, just download the following reg entry file (.reg), and double click it, the corresponding registry entry will be automatically added.

Download

Note:

1. You can drag any folder to the start menu, hold it until you see “Pin to start menu” and then drop it.This will automatically pin that particular folder to the start menu.

2. The folders pinned to the start menu by this method will not expand if you hover the mouse over it.You need to pin them to the taskbar instead to see the expansion of the folders.

[How To] Undo Clicking Never Save Password For This Site In Google Chrome

April 27, 2010 by bharath

Google Chrome:

google chrome logo

Google Chrome by default offers the option to save password for any webpage that requires the users to be logged in.You can see the classic “Do you want Google Chrome to save your password?” alert whenever you enter username and password for any website.

The users will have two options they can either choose “Save password” or “Never for this site”.If the user clicks “Never for this site”, no matter desirably or accidently, Google Chrome will no longer offer the prompt to save password for that login page.

Considering that you have clicked it accidentally and want to undo it, you can follow the steps given below to remove the site from save password prompt exception list.

Steps:

1. Click the Toolsmenu.

2. Select “Options”

3. Click the “Personal Stuff” tab.

4.Click on “Show saved passwords”

chrome show saved passwords

4. Click on the “Exceptions” tab

5. Select the site that you want to remove from the list

chrome remove site exceptions list

6.Click “Remove” (or use “Remove All” to clear the list) and click “Close”.

Display Your Custom Text On Windows Desktop

April 25, 2010 by bharath

Windows logo

Few days ago we have written a brief tutorial about how to display Windows 7 current version and build number on your desktop (right above the system task tray).The natural question that comes to our mind after performing this trick successfully is :”Can we customize this text so as to display our name for instance?”.

Well, if you have been thinking that way, just stop thinking and read this tutorial and implement it to display your own name on desktop instead of Windows 7 watermark.Follow these steps carefully.

Requirements:

1. You need to know how to take ownership of a file in Windows 7 and Windows Vista.

2. You need to download a small software called “Resource Hacker”.

Download

Steps:

1. Refer to display Windows 7 current version and build number set the settings to display Windows 7 version and build number on your desktop.This is the first step that you need to do.You need to restart your system after this step.

windows 7 build info

2. Once you have completed the above, the remaining task is to change or customise this text.To do this we need to edit the system file called “user32.dll.mui” in Resource Hacker.
Open windows explorer and copy and paste this in your address bar.

%windir%\System32\en-US

3. If you are using Windows 7 & Vista, the above command will open

“C:\Windows\System32\en-US”

folder for you.

Find the system file called “user32.dll.mui” and take ownership of the files.

user32.dll.mui windows 7

4. Now that you have the ownership of the file with you, you can go ahead and open and edit it in Resource Hacker.Just drag this file into the Resource Hacker window.

5. In the resource hacker, navigate to “String Table>45>1033”.In the right side of the window, you can see all the values running from 705 to 719.We don’t need to worry about the rest of the values, we just need to edit the values “715” and “716”.As you can see 715 (“%wsWindows %ws”) is responsible for displaying Windows version and 716 (“%ws Build %ws”) is responsible for displaying the build number if your Windows 7.

resource hacker user32.dll.mui edit

6.Now replace the text inside the quotes(“) in 715 and 716 with whatever text that you want to display on your desktop.

change string table values of user32.dll.miu in resource hacker

Once you have edited it, click “Compile Script” and then save the file (If you don’t have ownership of the file, here you will not be able to save it).

7. You are done, just restart the computer and you can see your own text being displayed instead of Windows version info.