Multi-use Lounge Icons

[chrisgreaves]

This is not a big deal, I'm just curious:

I have noticed that the lounge lizard icon appears on my bookmarks toolbar (as it should), but appears too on several other buttons, amongst them:

The Advertiser
Noan Mail
Worm Digest
Woody's Lounge

In layman's terms, what is the process that assigns an icon to a browser bookmark?

I'm using Mozilla FireFox 1.0, FWIW.

[Leif]

See <post#=317829>post 317829</post#> for some background info - but why it should appear for other sites I know not.

(A lounge search for <favicon> may reveal more...)

[chrisgreaves]

Leif, thanks for the prompt response.

I have found four favicon.txt files on my system. Three are in folders related to my clients, but one is in my Documents And Settings folder.

I will now rename all four, and watch the effect after I reboot.

[chrisgreaves]

I learned a bit more.
Placing the line<pre> <LINK REL="SHORTCUT ICON" HREF="viking.ico"></pre>

in my HTML, and lodging such an image on my server, causes the icon to show up
(1) in the address box
(2) as the bookmark
(3) as the tab icon

"favicon" was surely just the name chosen by an historic developer; I've seen postings that suggest the behaviour is related to IE5 only, but I am using FireFox.

[JoeP517]

For more information see Google Search: favicon at World Wide Web Consortium (the keeper of the official specifications for the web).

Joe

[chrisgreaves]

Thanks for the links. I'd found mine through GoogleGroups, same result!

[MickeyMouse]

I have been wanting to do this for a number of websites that I work on for various church groups and have never gotten around to doing anything about it till I saw this entry. Thanks for giving me the push <img src=/S/poke.gif border=0 alt=poke width=60 height=17> I needed.

I did successfully add a favicon to my websites but not until after some trial and tribulation. I will share those aforementioned tribulations as misery loves company.

The first is the issue of creating the icon image. The 3WC site states "This document does not discuss in detail how to create a favicon image. However, the format for the image you have chosen must be 16x16 pixels or 32x32 pixels, using either 8-bit or 24-bit colors. The format of the image must be one of PNG (a W3C standard), GIF, or ICO." I found a free app that converts any image you have to a '.ico' type file at http://www.coolutils.com/Image2Ico (see free download button towards botom of screen).

I started off by creating a .png file and saving it into my 'images' directory (being a rather neat person by nature) but could not get my browser to display it. I tried various attempts at modifying the code to make it work without any success. Finally I did some other searching and found a couple of tips that might help anyone else.

(1) The image has to be co-located at your root directory (where your index.htm file resides) and not with your other images.
(2) You can name the file whatever you want but I found a number of suggestions that it should be named 'favicon.ico'. It appears that a number of the browsers are pre-programmed to look for this file just like it is set to find and display the index files.
(3) If you are still having trouble getting the browser to display your prized icon (in IE) try grabbing the image to the left of the url in the address bar three or four times. For some reason this teases the browser into updating this image (never had to tease my browser before).

The following is the code that I ended up getting to work:

<link rel="icon"
href="http://www.olmmparish.org/favicon.ico"
type="image/x-icon">

The 3WC site refers to a 'profile' to define the icon attribute for the 'rel' but I couldn't find much on the profile and ultimately got it to work without it.

I hope this helps anyone else considering this activity.