Monday, August 3, 2026
Introducing, Font Lonesome
On the one hand, there are plenty of HTML entities that can be used as icons on your blog. On the other hand, just try finding them!
I wrote about this recently when I pointed out that there is indeed unicode for the magnifying glass commonly used for search. It’s just not called that.
There are others like that. For example, a bulleted list icon that could be used to represent categories does exist, but it’s the mathematical symbol for colon equals. Another example would the hamburger menu. It’s there, too, but you need to know it’s the I Ching trigram for heaven.
So anyway, I rounded up a bunch of them and made a mini site called Font Lonesome. So called because you can use them all by their lonesome without a third-party service.
I use HTML entities exclusively for icons on Newsonaut, and so far it has worked well for me. It’s also kind of a fun challenge.
Over at thriftmac, though, I need a variety of icons to represent the app categories. For that, I turn to Font Awesome, which has a good selection of free icons.
Edit: I had to make a few changes after discovering some of them render as emojis in Safari. D'oh!
More posts in the Coding category
