Fellow bloggers, how to get your favicon working with feedburner

A little off topic for Planet V12n, but here’s a tip for my fellow bloggers (and RSS subscription readers) …

Google have just added favicon support to their great online RSS reader, catchily named Google Reader.  At the moment the default is to have them turned off, but to turn them go to Settings > Preferences tab > Misc section > tick Show favicons for subscriptions.

However, I was a little disheartened to see the favicon for vReference just showing up as a regular RSS icon, despite the site having a custom cloud icon.  It seems that if you use the popular FeedBurner service to publish your RSS feeds, then favicons are not supported.  Here’s google’s answer:

Why doesn’t my site’s favicon always show up when my feed is displayed in a feed reader?

There is currently no solution for this issue; FeedBurner may offer one in the future; this topic will be updated to reflect any new capabilities.

However after a little digging, I discovered that if you copy your favicon.ico file to the root directory of your website, then it is displayed properly.  For WordPress blogs, these icons are normally tucked away somewhere in /wp-content/themes/<theme_name>/images.

reader

6 thoughts on “Fellow bloggers, how to get your favicon working with feedburner

  1. A Google search brought me straight to this site because I’m having the very same problem! I placed my custom favicon in the main directory, but it still isn’t showing up in Google Reader.

    … I wonder why I can’t get it to work! Bleh!

  2. Extremely informative post, should you could explain more, i only know about piano benches for sale.

  3. I just tried this with one of my client sites and it worked ok.
    One other thing I did though was to rename the icon to “favicon.ico”.

  4. Yeeaa, looks like it is working… dunno if it had to be left, so it could propagate.

    I had originally named it “favicon.ico”.

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