Housekeeping
Posted on August 13th, 2005 by
Thanks to reader (we think) Bruce, Sadly, No! now has a favicon. We’ve always hated those on other people’s websites, but when we got one sent to us for free, our feelings changed. So there you have it. Pretty soon, we hope, our plans for world global domination will be complete when we get a logo. Watch out!
Be sure to stop by tomorrow, when we answer 3 months of unread emails to S,N! we just discovered. Well, those are the newses for tonight.
What’s a favicon?
Yes, what’s a favicon?
Well, obviously, Seb(jeff) is just gonna leave us clueless types dangling, thus proving all those wingnut insults about how dumb all us liberals are. I hate when that happens.
Google to the rescue! I coulda googled the term “favicon” before I got all bitchy about it, but where’s the fun in that? Some of my bookmarks have these thingys, such as Kos and Huffington Post. And, oddly, A Perfectly Cromulent Blog. And the Blogger ones have a generic “Blogger” favicon. S,N! doesn’t seem to have one. Did you actually install this thing? Is it ‘cos I’m not using IE?
For those interested, here’s the search.
That’s interesting. While the favicon totally doesn’t work for me in Safari, it does in Firefox. Bizarre. I wonder why some other favicons do work in Safari if the S,N! one won’t?
Yep, it’s me. I don’t have access to a mac, so I didn’t know about the issue with safari. Apparently safari doesn’t request favicons by default. Apple expects webmasters to place code on their site that causes safari to request the favicon.
It’s pretty simple to implement, but one wonders why they would choose to have such a requirement in the first place.
For those who don’t know, a favicon is a 16×16 pixel PNG file that is always named ‘favicon.ico’. Most modern web browsers (with, apparently, the exception of Safari) request this file along with requests for a web page. It is a way to differentiate different web sites in the users’ browsers and bookmarks.
A word about Internet Explorer:
Internet Explorer does support favicons but will only request (and display) them if the site is in the user’s favorites list.
They have posted code (scroll down) to prompt users to add the site to their favorites list if you would be interested in that. Personally, I think that’s going a little too far. Favicons (IMO) should be mostly transparent to the user; something that just kind of happens without any thought or action on the user’s part. However, that is the webmaster’s decision and I would not criticize it after the fact.