I wonder how many blog posts begin with these sentiments?
When I started this blog I promised myself I would never do a post like this; guilt and apology. That’s not what this blog is about. It wasn’t supposed to get personal. I’m not happy.

It would be easier if the blogs doldrum stillness wasn’t such an accurate reflection of my post-grad research. I’m not saying there’s nothing going on, there’s plenty of deck scrubbing and sail mending, but there’s also a distinct lack of forward momentum. And the crew (that would be me) is getting antsy.

Normally all this would go unmentioned, however… When I’m having trouble posting I do what I suspect most bloggers do, I read other peoples blogs. My two favourite blogs (with-out and triangularsun) have in the past few weeks taught me a couple of things; 1. a personal dialogue does not indicate a lack of intellectual engagement (it is not a fall away from knowledge), 2. if (or when) these blogs cease to exist I will miss them.

With these points in mind, I decided to make this post; an embarrassed and muffled apology (I’m not Spiro, this is as personal as I get), and an indication that there is more to come. This is the “umm” you sometimes need before the conversation can continue.

To answer my own question, a Google blog search for “sorry I haven’t posted in a while” returns 1,641 hits. I feel kind of dirty.

My blog has a face that I never see.

In the past two weeks I’ve had questions regarding a small head that is apparently appearing next to my blog’s web address; “Is is me?”. Well no it’s not, but more to the point what the hell are you talking about? all I see is the standard picture of the world (I use Safari). For a few days I dismissed these reports as the sad ramblings of the internetically challenged (sorry Lucus), but then I was sent this:

(thanks @ for the image)

Like most people I’ve been aware of those little address bar icons for a while now but I hadn’t paid them much attention – time to change that.

Apparently they’re called “favicons”, a combination of the terms FAV (for favourites because they appear in IE’s favourites bar?) and ICON (the Windows file format they use). To get one to appear on your site all you need to do is make a small picture (16 x 16 pixels) and save it in ICON file format as “favicon.ico”. Upload this file to the root directory for your site and voila! (if you don’t get the voila! try following Matthew’s far more comprehensive instructions – read his addendum at the bottom of the page; apparently you can also save them as .png files)

So, what’s this interloping head doing on my blog? I went searching my sites files for a favicon… no? Not in my sites root directory, not in my templates folder, nowhere. No sign of my favicon and no explanation as to why I can’t see it and everyone else can. I guess I could replace the head with my own stupid version, but I want to get to the bottom of this. Can you see the blue beanied head? Do you know from whence it came? Comment me…