pihole.org

I’m delighted to announce that WordPress.com now (finally) supports custom blog favicons! This is an important step forward in what was previously a little blue circle-dominated world. Back when piHole started, I was using a custom installation of WordPress on my 1&1 Linux server, which allowed me to use my own favicon simply by placing a favicon.ico file at the root of my server, and tweaking a couple files. So I whipped up a little 4-bit blocky drawing of a pi symbol and a hole (fitting, no?) just for fun. Turns out I fell in love with its ironic simplicity and it came to be (in my mind at least) the perfect 16 by 16 pixel representation of my blog, and vicariously, myself.

Then came the day when piHole shut down because I had to move to ASP.NET to take advantage of my .NET skills on the web side of things, and sadly, WordPress was PHP. And so it remained for quite a while and I was without an informal outlet for my thoughts and ramblings.

Then one day while I was developing the early interface of OrangeNote I was just so thrilled at how things were turning out that I just had to tell the world, and so piHole was reborn. I decided to give the hosted service a try, even though I knew it had a few limitations. I’ll admit I first checked out Blogger, since I’d already had experience with WordPress (not that it wasn’t a good experience), but frustratingly, someone had already registered a “pihole” blog with Blogger! (Like, as if!) So I meandered back to WordPress and set up my very first WordPress.com blog, pihole.

I was delighted to discover that I could even reinstate the old pihole.org domain that I had lying around somewhere, which I promptly did, but was dismayed to learn that WordPress.com had no support for custom favicons whatsoever, and my little 4-bit drawing would have to stay buried in a directory somewhere, hidden from the world…

…until today (well, yesterday)!