Them there icon's . . .

that appear in the "favourites" bar

[Bendy]

So, when ya stick something into your "favourites" bar in IE, sometimes the link aquires a specific icon for that site/link . . .

. . . so how do I make 'em? How do they work? Is it hard?

[takagi]

If you search for 'favicon.ico [google.com]' you will found all you need.

[Bendy]

two thumbs up brothers!
cheers!

[Robert Thivierge]

IE has a bug, whereby the favicon vanishes on the user's favorite's menu, usually after the computer is re-booted and/or temp files are deleted. The behaviour is irregular.

I re-confirmed/tested this bug today with IE 6 on Windows XP. I first found the bug when favicon came out with IE 5 (Win98).

[limbo]

Yep seen that alot. Infact i dont really think there is a lot of point in creating favicons until there is full support for the feature. Unless you have time to kill? ;)

[JamesR]

favicon.com

[Krapulator]

>>Infact i dont really think there is a lot of point in creating favicons until there is full support for the feature

I did it just to stop those pesky 404 errors in my logs

[Jeff_H]

Plus it gives you a very rough idea of how many people bookmark your site.

[Robino]

It takes about five minutes of work and it looks cool.

[bill]

Plus it gives you a very rough idea of how many people bookmark your site.

Not any more. Browsers like Opera, Mozilla and the Mozilla-based browsers now request that icon for every page. That will skew your stats quite a bit.

[TheDave]

I've used IconXP, seemed to get the job done b4 the shareware license expired :P Might check out that sushi one tho :) /back from checking out sushi. I would rate IconXP better. Opinion not fact :) Icon Sushi is freeware so it's got that going for it.

[troels nybo nielsen]

I have made lots of icons without having a specific program for that purpose.

First I create a square graphic file of some kind in my antique Corel Photo-Paint 7. In many cases it is just a matter of cutting a square out of an existing picture. Most of my icons are closely related to my logos.

Then I use irfanview to resize the graphic to 16*16 pixels and decrease the colour depth to 16 colours. If it looks alright I save it as an .ico file at once. If it looks a bit wrong I save it as a .bmp, open it in Photo-Paint, zoom into 1600% and edit it.

I generally have LOTS of windows opened in Opera 7, including some of my own. Then an icon is really a VERY big advantage.

[bedlam]

I have made lots of icons without having a specific program for that purpose.

If your server (or your own system) has NetPBM installed, it's a cinch to do it from shell:

1. First create the graphic ;)
   
2. If you can from your graphics software, save it as a .pnm file
   
3. If you saved it as a .pnm, execute this in shell in the directory containing the .pnm:

   ppmtowinicon -output favicon.ico <inputfile.pnm>

4. If you could not save the file as a .pnm, you will need to convert it and then output it as a winicon (use one of these, depending on whether you saved the original as .png or .gif):

   giftopnm <inputfile.gif> ¦ ppmtowinicon -output favicon.ico
   pngtopnm <inputfile.png> ¦ ppmtowinicon -output favicon.ico

5. Make sure that favicon.ico is in the root directory (or where ever you want it to be) and link to it from your pages:

   <link rel="SHORTCUT ICON" href="http://www.mydomain.com/favicon.ico" />

   
   

This method (afaik) originally came from ht*p://www.mavetju.org/unix/favicon.php

-B

[ILLstyle]

favicon.com

[jebarber]

I have a favicon question.

I administer a website for a department within our company.
Therefor, my index.html is in a subdirectory of the root.
In the past I just put my favicon.ico in that subdirectory and everything worked great.

Then one day the administrator of the root decided to make a favicon.ico for the root site. BAM! now all my pages have his favicon.

Is there a way for my to force my icon on my pages?

[troels nybo nielsen]

Yes. Insert something like this in your head section:

<link rel="SHORTCUT ICON" href="http://www.yoursite.com/yourdirectory/favicon.ico">

And welcome to WebmasterWorld.

[edited by: troels_nybo_nielsen at 5:09 pm (utc) on Dec. 9, 2003]

[choster]

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/path/to/favicon.ico">

[edit]Dang, a few seconds too slow[/edit]

[troels nybo nielsen]

Hehe. Earlier today I was SEVEN MINUTES too slow!

<added>jebarber, as you may already have figured you can actually give every single page its own icon if you want to. You just need a subdirectory to put each icon in so that it gets its own URL.</added>

[jebarber]

great, thanks alot.

I just wish I had found this forum a while ago. :)

[bill]

...and if you want your code to validate XHTML:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://domain.com/favicon.ico" [b]type="image/x-icon"[/b] />