Creating a favicon.ico

A "favicon" is the little icon that sometimes shows up in the corner of the navigation bar (by the URL) in a browser. It needs to be a Windows-style icon.

Usually, you make it show up by adding two lines into the <head> section of an HTML page:

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

Windows-style icons come in various even sizes: 16x16 pixels, 32x32 pixels, 64x64 pixels, etc. Your first step is to create various copies of your logo (or whatever) in some common sizes. I created the three sizes listed above in Gimp.

Then, you need to convert your images into icons. Under Debian, the icoutils package contains utilities that can do this. (It will convert from PNG images only, though, so make sure you save your images in that format.) I used a command line something like this:

   icotool -c -o favicon.ico logo-c-16x16.png logo-c-32x32.png logo-c-64x64.png

That's all it takes.