Welcome to the last Toolsday for April. Spring is here and it’s time to get organized. I’ve been doing a lot to enhance my site now that I’m firmly cemented in WordPress and I found a super handy tool for one of the most elusive website features for beginning webmasters – the favicon.

Google defines a Favicon as a small icon that is used by some browsers to identify a bookmarked Web site. In layman’s terms, this is the little icon that shows up in your address bar to the left of the URL and in your Favorites or Bookmarks menu beside the website name. Dynamic Drive offers half a dozen really useful tools on their website, but my favorite has got to be their super easy to use Favicon Generator.

Regular image editing software won’t create icons, or .ico, files, something that’s always irritated me. But this handy online tool will take any gif, jpg, png, or bmp file and shrink & convert it into an ico file. Then you just download the file and follow the directions on the page to add the favicon to your website.

For those of you using WordPress, these instructions aren’t quite accurate, so when I used it I did have to do a bit of searching. I found these really easy instructions from the WordPress Codex area.  Remember that favicons are another form of branding your website, so using your logo or a slight variation is the most logical step (just take a look at sites like Google, Entrecard, & Commission Junction to see good examples).  So take a look, decide on an image, and make your website stand out just a bit more with a unique favicon!

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I fussed around more with del.icio.us, Digg, and Technorati. So far my thoughts…

del.icio.us: really easy to use. I exported my bookmarks from Firefox and imported them into my bookmarks in a matter of minutes. I’ve spent probably the last half an hour cleaning up my tags since they’re so scattered and I’m a neat freak like that. But it’s a really simple interface that’s a breeze to use. I’ve head a lot about this site, so I get the feeling I’ll be using it a lot whenever I come across something particularly cool.

Digg: pretty easy to use, but there’s a lot there. The home page of News & Videos is cracking me up reading some of the titles. Not sure how this can be leveraged though without digging my own stories. I did try a plea on Twitter for digs, but got none. And it’s taken me hours, but I’ve figured out how to add the Digg This button you see to the right. I found out though that I have a friend already on Digg, so I can foresee messing around more with this and building more friends on this network.

Technorati: Okay what the hell? The main function of the site, as far as I can tell, is to keep a list of your favorites. Do me a favor and look HERE. Do you see any favorites? If you don’t I’m really annoyed because I followed their instructions to export my blogs from Google Reader, saved the file correctly, imported them to Technorati, they showed up for a couple minutes and now they don’t show. So my frustration is building with this site to the point where I’m already ready to give up… which for an experienced web user like me, isn’t good at all. So I’ve decided to walk away from it for awhile, focus my efforts on the other two, and mess around with this once they’ve got this bug fixed. I already ventured into their help forums on the first day… not really a good sign, folks.

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