| WordPress feed favicon (1) | Thursday, Aug 10, 2006 2:50 pm |
I'm great at finding obscure issues with WordPress. One such issue is the absence of a favicon in RSS feeds. I use Bloglines as my feed reader, and I like how almost every subscription has that site's favicon. Well, except my site (yes, I subscribe to myself ... it's always nice to read what I've been up to). I'm not really sure what the problem is, but I considered editing some core WordPress files to enable this functionality. But this should always be a last resort. Enter the Favicon Manager plugin. It adds a few lines of code to the RSS 2.0 and Atom feeds (as well as the main site header, though I already had that) and lets you specify your favicon in one of the WordPress options panels. Bloglines Publisher Tools said the favicon is updated weekly, so I'll see if it works in a few days.
It turns out that this didn't work. After about 12 days of not seeing my favicon show up in Bloglines, I disabled the plugin and tried something different: I put the favicon in the root directory instead of in the theme directory. I originally had an .htaccess redirect set up so that if "/favicon.ico" was requested, it would redirect to "/wp-content/themes/makelite/img/favicon.ico". This worked fine for the main site, but apparently it didn't work for the feed. I don't know why. But today the favicon showed up in Bloglines, so this was obviously the solution.