favicon.ico mystery

[bjordan@sover.net (bob jordan)]

******    message to minivend-users from bjordan@sover.net (bob jordan)     ******

Hi All

For a long time, I've been finding in one of my error.logs
entries similar to this:

[Thu Feb 25 03:57:06 1999] access to /home/edgeco/www/favicon.ico failed for
207.136.51.144, reason: File does not exist

Attempts to track down why someone was requesting a file we never
had always seemed to lead only to other sites stats pages with similar
'file not found' entries.

Finally figured it out today.  It's a Bill Gates trick. . .

>From http://www.microsoft.com/sitebuilder/magazine/cheatsheet.asp:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
"This trick doesn't require any code. To place a custom icon in the
user's Favorites, simply place a logo icon at the root of your Web site
and name it favicon.ico. For example, put the file at
http://www.domainname.com/favicon.ico. When the user adds any
page in your domain to his or her Favorites, your icon will appear
next to the link -- in both the Favorites menu and the Favorites pane,
which appears at the right side of the browser.

You must use the Win32 Icon file format for this image. As of this
writing, this feature works on Win32 versions of Internet Explorer 5
only.

If for some reason you can't put the icon at the root of your domain,
you can include the tag below to specify an alternate location:

<LINK REL="SHORTCUT ICON" href="/path/foo.ico">"
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Thought this info might save someone else some head-scratching.  And
I suppose it's a cute feature.

- bj
-
To unsubscribe from the list, DO NOT REPLY to this message.  Instead, send
email with 'UNSUBSCRIBE minivend-users' in the body to Majordomo@minivend.com.
Archive of past messages: http://www.minivend.com/minivend/minivend-list