Ralford's Ramblings » Uncategorized http://www.ralford.net/wordpress Thoughts and Happenings of a Pondering Wayfarer Thu, 04 Mar 2010 03:46:15 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.2 en hourly 1 Site Subscribers and Favicons http://www.ralford.net/wordpress/2009/07/27/site-subscribers-and-favicons/ http://www.ralford.net/wordpress/2009/07/27/site-subscribers-and-favicons/#comments Tue, 28 Jul 2009 03:16:21 +0000 ralford http://www.ralford.net/wordpress/?p=201 Last week I used a Photoshop plugin to create a favicon.ico file for the Dirty Superb website. This was my first time making one, and it took me a while to get it looking right since I wanted the image to look decent at 16 x 16 pixels. I started with a 64 x 64 pixel image, and sharpened the edges before shrinking it (if you don’t sharpen the edges they can get lost or blurred when you shrink it). That didn’t work too well for me, so I settled for a simple two-color icon where sharpening wasn’t an issue.

Shortly after, I whipped up an icon for Ralford.net. When I had something that wasn’t horrible, I published it. A few days went by, and when I saw it next to the link on my Google Profile page, I thought it kind of looked like crap… so… I took it down. Today I checked out my Feedburner Subscriber count and saw it drastically went from a whopping 5 subscribers down to 1. Feedburner’s Subscribers chart showed me that this happened within a day or two of removing my favicon. Until I removed it, I’ve had a steady 4 to 5 “readers” (almost all of them bots) since creating this blog.

Fewer Feed Subscribers

So I suppose the moral of the story is to not create a half-assed favicon the first time around. Get it right, publish it, and be satisfied. Though the Ralford.net favicon is still in the works, I’m rather happy with the first one I created. You can see it over at the Dirty Superb website.

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