Create a favicon.ico from any photo
The makers of one of my favorite markup/text/code editors on Windows, HTML Kit, have made a web service available which creates favicons out of images.
Favicons are the small images just before the URL in the address bar of many web browsers.* The images are in the .ico file format, so this web service takes any graphic (like a jpg or gif), resizes it and converts it to the .ico format which includes both a 16×16 and a 32×32 pixel version embedded within it.
It’s a tough challenge finding an image that is recognizable at that size, but totally worth it for the visual branding it brings to your site on readers’ and users’ tab bars and bookmark lists.
Once you’ve created an unzipped your favicon.ico to the web server, include the following inside your pages <head> tag to activate the icon:
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/path/to/your/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />
* Firefox’s support is probably the best, displaying favicon’s on bookmarks, tabs and in the address bar. Internet Explorer’s support for favicons is pretty much nonexistent.