Tuesday, September 21, 2004

Favicon

Apparently the network outage yesterday was the result of a gas leak in the building next to the NOC. The power company disconnected the power to the NOC and they were not allowed to turn on the generators. I am glad I did call the host. I figure that they were having an extremely frustrating day.

Anyway, when looking at my blogs to assess the damage, I was surprised to see the large number of errors generated by browsers looking for favicon.ico. These were all calling the error page...so I was wasting bandwidth on a file people were not finding. Figuring it is better to waste the bandwidth delivering a favicon.ico than an error page, I've started adding icons to sites. Here's a few:

Crass Commercial United Nations Association of Utah Park City

I am making the icons with a thirty day trial of IconCoolEditor that I got from download.com. If I ever get any contracts, I should buy this program...does a good job.

Apparently, if you just create a 16x16 image in the ico format and save it as favicon.ico, web browser will pick that up and use it in various displays. I have the problem that many of my sites are in shared get ups...so I need to save the files with a different name and put the code <link rel="shortcut icon" href="/crass.ico" type="image/x-icon" /> in the head of the page.

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