Forum Moderators: DixonJones
Or does that mean theyve just opened there browser favorites list?
Also, how do you know, if people are clicking your site from there favorites list?
Thanks :)
As to how you know they are clicking on you from their favorites.. unfortunately you don't. It will show up with no referrer, but that could be type in traffic too.
For instance, Opera 7 will display the favicon in the location bar and the window tab, whether it's bookmarked or not. And it DOESN'T display the icon in a bookmark list!
Phoenix 0.5, Netscape 7 and other recent flavors of Mozilla show the favicon in the location window but not on the tab or the bookmark.
Opera and Mozilla will call for the favicon if there's a link to it in the header.
Explorer 6 diplays the favicon in the bookmark file, but not on the location bar. It only calls for the .ico file if you create a new favorite, and then it reads it from the cache.
So, there's not a lot you can read into the favicon "GET" anymore, unless you isolate Explorer in your log analysis. Then you can get an idea of how many bookmarks have been created. But with the other browsers possibly calling for the file on every page they hit, the numbers can become meaningless with just a few "other browser" sessions in the log.
[edited by: tedster at 9:15 am (utc) on Mar. 23, 2003]
Explorer 6 WILL display the favicon in the location bar IF you have previously saved the site to favorites AND the favicon is still cached AND you either reload the page OR access the page from the favorites menu a second time.
So does that mean that
if there is no link to favicon in your header
and you see a get for favicon in your logs
then it must be an IE user bookmarking?
Explorer 6 WILL display the favicon in the location bar IF...
I knew my IE6 was flaky - thanks for the correction
...if there is no link to favicon...then it must be an IE user bookmarking?
That's my current presumption - but I am nowhere near 100% certain on it and haven't done thorough testing.
Phoenix 0.5, Netscape 7 and other recent flavors of Mozilla show the favicon in the location window but not on the tab or the bookmark.Phoenix .5 does show icons in the tabs, and in the bookmarks. Though the bookmarks one vanishes after a while.
Mozilla now can show favicon no the tabs, and even on the "Personals Toolbar" and it's dropdown menus. Mozilla automatically requests the file with no user intervention.
- Rob
Feel free to use it or change it in any way you want.
#!/bin/sh
grep \/favicon.ico $1 ¦ awk '{print $1}' ¦ sort -f ¦ uniq
Usage:
# favicon.sh /path/to/my/server/logs/access.log
Have fun!
I went through a lot of favicon hits in my logs and every case where the hit was very "new" (i.e. within seconds of the entrance hit and the off-site referrer, implying that it was automatically triggered by the browser) the User-Agent had "Gecko" or "Konqueror" in it but never "MSIE". Actually one did have "MSIE" but it seemed as if it could have been a hasty Add-to-favorites. Nearly all "MSIE" hits to favicon.ico were lone (no traffic from that IP address within the preceding or following seconds).
What a shame, it would be sooo terribly useful to know for sure who was bookmarking so I could qualify the traffic from Google AdWords. The more I study logs the less I feel I know for sure. Don't even get me started on CookieTracking...
-- Bob Stein, VisiBone
