Favicon

I did it! I added a little favicon to my wiki page! It may seem like such a small thing--and it is. Still, it wasn't easy for me.

First, I used http://www.chami.com/html-kit/services/favicon/ to create my favicon--in this case, a tiny little version of my AmbientLibrarian.org logo. Then, I had to download favicon package to my computer. The favicon instructions then implied that I could just upload the resulting favicon.ico to my file where my web page is, but I found that I had to unzip the file first.

The instructions then said to insert an html tag,
< rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.ico">, into the header section of my web page.

If my web page were a simple html document, I would have had no trouble. However, my web site is a wiki, and the file structure on the server seems immense to me. I'm hesitant to change too much, because I don't want to ruin everything. At first, I uploaded the favicon to the same file where my logo is--that made sense to me. Then I found an index.html document in a completely different folder. From my past experience with making a web page, I thought this might be where the tag would go, but after inspecting it, I realized this was a generic page from my hosting company--sort of a place holder file until I had my real page up.

I found another index file, but it was a PHP document. This makes sense, because MediaWiki is written in PHP. Still, that made me even more nervous about messing with anything.

I decided to give it a try, and added the html link. I tested it, and nothing happened...but, nothing happening is better than my whole wiki disappearing :) I started thinking about my past experience with uploading images for a web page, and I thought maybe the favicon file should be in the same folder as the index file...so, I uploaded it again, this time to the same folder as my index.php file...and, viola! I have an itsy-bitsy, teeny-tiny logo next to my AmbientLibrarian.org URL, that also appears next to the title of the page in book mark lists. Awesome.

Now, I'm trying to figure out how to add some meta tags to increase findability. I can add them into the index.php file, but I don't know if that will make a difference...