14 DAY TRIAL // Blogger has started testing an interesting new feature, a small one but one that should probably have been enabled long, long time ago. Users can now upload their own favicons for their blogs, so we'll finally stop seeing the ubiquitous orange Blogger favicon on half the blogs we visit in a day.
The new feature is only available to Blogger in Draft users, the 'Labs' version of the blogging platform, so it may take a bit longer until most users can customize their blogs this way.
"For many bloggers, having a custom favicon (the tiny image displayed in your browser’s window or tab) is the finishing touch that ties together the design and identity of a great looking blog," Dongil Seo, Software Engineer at Google, wrote.
"Today, we're pleased to announce that Blogger in Draft users can now add a customized favicon to their blog," he announced.
"You can add a custom favicon from the Design | Page Elements tab (or, from the Layout tab if you're using the new user interface), by clicking Edit on the new 'Favicon' setting above the navbar element," he explained.
For the moment, Blogger only supports .ico files to be used as favicons. Seeing as most people are not very familiar with the format, they will have to convert their existing PNGs or Jpegs into .ico.
Most photo editing software should be able to do this, for example the open-source GIMP, but you can also find converters online. Google says that it's working on adding support for more image formats, so this is only a temporary problem. By the time the feature lands in the regular Blogger, it should be able to work with PNG, JPEG and possibly other images formats.
It's interesting that it took so long for Blogger to roll this out, but it's likely not the technical aspects of the feature that prevented it. More likely, Google wanted the Blogger logo in as many places as possible, to make it clear that a blog you're visiting is hosted by the Google-owned service.