Favorite Favicons

You know... those tiny icons that show up in your browser bar when you are shuttling from one site to another? I had the hardest time coming up with a good favicon for Dakota Street Design. With only 16 x 16 square pixels to work with, it can be a challenge to come up with design. 

I was inspired by downloading a font suite from github.com -- among the fonts was an icon for a frame with crop marks. Check in the browser bar at the heading - News - Dakota Street Design. Voila! It's simple, it's sweet, and it's representative of one of my favorite types of design projects... print projects with a full "bleed" that require crop marks for the printer to trim. 

Word on the street is that the latest systems will allow for responsive design of favicons - to display differently on various monitors and browsers. We'll keep an eye out for them... and maybe someday, when the fundamental 16 px canvas is bigger, Dakota Street Design will have a bigger palette to play with.

Update: January 2019

As predicted above, favicons have gotten bigger. The recommendation is now to build them at 500px square. A typical unexpected display might be as a button on a retina-display iPhone. That calls for high resolution!

Accordingly, we’ve updated our logo and our favicon.

 

 
DSD-favicon.png
 

Using RSS feeds

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Adding an RSS feed to a website with a blog is a no-brainer, but in this post I'll share some tips on how to make it work for the people who use your website.

Getting the feed delivered to your browser or reader

Depending on what browser you use (such as Firefox or Safari), if you click on the RSS feed icon below, you'll see an option to subscribe to an RSS feed in your browser.  You'll be able to place a bookmark that leads immediately to the news page.

But not all browsers work with this function; if you're using Chrome, you may get a page of meaningless code.

Besides, what if you'd rather get updates delivered to your email directly?

If you right click on the RSS feed, and select "copy link address," you can open up your email client (Outlook, Macintosh Mail or the like) and create a new RSS feed. Past the link address into the feed option, and voila! - you have a live bookmark your browser where the blog updates will appear whenever posted. Remember - you have to click on the bookmark to see the updates.

Feedburner supplies the rss code with additional options. Here's an example of the same feed supplied by Feedburner:

Getting the feed delivered to your email inbox

So - what if you want the update delivered straight to your email?

When logged into feedburner, click on the publicize tab, then look for email subscriptions in the left hand column. You can access html code for a form signup (as above) or a simple link to sign up for updates.