Blogging Tips: Everyone Favicon (Or: what's the icon next to your URL?)

Is there anyone out there who never saw an icon like this before? When you have your own blog and haven't generated the icon yet, it does look like this:

Even when this little icon appears in the browser address bar I like to generate it to have my own, personalised icon.

Google is my best friend (and your'r too I guess ;)) when I want to try something new and don't know where to look for it. After a while I found this homepage.

For those of you who might need a little explanation, here we go:

First: Decide what kind of icon you want. Well for me it was pretty easy, I wanted to have a little Jay Park looking all cute and smexy next to my URL. At least it's cute...

On Favicon you have the opportunity to make your own icon by creating own, but to be honest that sounds pretty tough. If you aren't into nerdy pixel things then you should have a look at the "Import Image" tab where you can upload an existing photo.
Keep in mind your picture will be shrinked to a little icon (16x16 pixels to be exact), so you shouldn't chose on with plenty of details on it (no smexy-Jay-with-honey-abs-icon...). Try different pictures to get a feeling for the result.

Lovely Jay looks like this:

Yes, you can't recognise him, but when you take a look at the browser's address the outcome is already reviewable.
Second: All you have to do know is clicking on the download button under your photo and a save box pops up.

Third: Again blogger makes it easy to integrate this toy to your blog. Go on the "Layout" page and upload your icon (make sure you know where you saved it ;)).

Sometimes it takes some hours until you can see you icon, you can either wait, use a different browser or clear your cache.

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Blogging Tips - Save your blog

Hello everyone!
I am on blogspot for a little while now and thought it might be helpful for a few who aren't acquainted with blogger to do some kind of a "Blogging Tips series". Yet I have no idea how often I will write about it, but this one is pretty important to share with fellow bloggers.


Everyone had to deal with a similiar situation once, I guess. Sometimes blogs are being marked as a spam by Blogger or just disappear, leaving a helpless blogger behind. I came across lots of posts in help forums and I have been there too some time ago. Since my experiences terrified me I decided to make a backup plan.

How does this backup plan might look like, you probably ask. Well, let me tell you first you don't have to be a total nerd to save your blog from being deleted. Lucky us Blogger has a nice feature so we can save our entire blog contents (i.e. posts, design, adds).
In my life I lost a lot of data, be it my laptop harddrive which suddenly decided not to work anymore or my laptop which broke down several times. Being on the save site feels a lot better and let's face it - you can't trust electronic things (I hope my lap isn't huffy now...).

Let's go through the back up step by step.
First go on your Blogger starting page, click the little arrow and chose "Settings".

Second: On the left tab you see different options under "Settings", click on "Other" and three different links along the top of the page will appear:
Import blog, Export blog, and Delete blog (you really shouldn't click that one...). "Export Blog" is what we need right now, so click on that.

Third: A screen will pop up telling you some random things and asking you if you want to download your blog. Depending on how much you already posted this might take a couple of minutes, but then pops up another window (save box actually) and you can save your entire content. Make sure you will find it afterwards and that's it. :)

And if you wonder how you can get your blog back when it got deleted: Click "Import Blog" and chose your saved file and it comes back to the blogger world.

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