I love Favicons, which are are the tiny (16×16 square images, to be specific) that appear in the URL, or in the browser link, or in the tab of your browser when your blog or website is being viewed.  

(If you want to see some examples of Favicons that may inspire you, here is a great catalogue of some of the best ones out there.) 

Even though the Favicon is a relatively minor part of your web site’s visual experience, I have always thought that the Favicon goes a LONG way in making your web site or blog look polished.  

Which is why I was glad when my Posterous friends Rohan and Nischal tipped me off that it was possible to manually customize your Favicon on Posterous.  I opened up the code and successfully added my favorite Favicon (which you should be able to see now), and I thought I’d include the steps for anyone else to do the same thing.  

To change the Favicon on your Posterous blog, use the following steps:

1.  Select the image file you want to use for your Posterous Favicon.  Note: images MUST be square, and they MUST be 16×16 pixels. 
2.  Upload your 16×16 square image to the Web.  I uploaded my Favicon to my Flickr account here.  
3.  Take the image location (if you used Flickr like I did, you simply click “Share,” then select “Grab the HTML, and copy the part of the code that ends in the “.jpg” or “.png” or whatever image file you used. 
4.  Then you’ll need to “Enable Advanced Theming” for your Posterous blog, and by doing a “Find Replace,” get rid of the default Favicon image, which is written like this: “/images/favicon.png,” and replace it with the new Flickr image location.  
5.  Save changes and you’re done.

I hope this post will help folks get even more out of their Posterous accounts.  Let me know if there is a better way to accomplish any of this, or if you have trouble following the steps I outlined. 

(Quick aside: I’m curious if Guy Kawasaki will soon change his Alltop page’s Posterous Favicon.  I have always been interested by the way he and his company use Posterous; they have one of the most highly customized and impressive accounts I’ve seen, yet they put up with a generic little Posterous Favicon.)