Favourites icons

talk random
1

Hi

Sorry, this isn’t related to Flash, but then I guess it doesn’t need to be to be in this forum!!

When I added kirupaforum.com to my favourites list (IE6) I noticed it came with a neat little logo to the left of the link

I’ve noticed it before but never figured out how to do it.

Can anyone out there give me some tips/code on how to do this, it’s neat and I’d like to know how its done without pawing through the pages of code behind this web page.

Thanks

John :slight_smile:

2

Hey JohnLawton,
You added the forums to your favorites?? What is wrong with you?! :slight_smile: Haha, just kidding. I never added the forums to the favorites until you mentioned it, and I just noticed it myself. Simply place the following code in between the Head tags of your Web pages:

<LINK REL="SHORTCUT ICON" HREF="myicon.ico">

The GIF or icon should be in the .ico ending. That should. I found another link that might help you out: http://www.htmlgoodies.com/tutors/favicon.html And don’t worry about this question not being about Flash. Nothing in this thread really ever is haha!

Cheers!
Kirupa :rambo:

3

You can do what Kirupa says, but really all you need to do is download an icon maker from download.com I used Bitmap to Icon. Then make a .bmp and then open it in the program and turn it into a .ico. (You might be able to just rename the file, but I have heard that it can screw up sometimes and is safer to do it through a program.) Then, name the icon favicon.ico and just place it in your main directory and voila!

-brad-

4

hot diggity dang! you learn something new everyday! i luv learning!!! :nerd:

5

hot diggity dang! you learn something new everyday! i luv learning!!! :nerd:

6

Hi

Thanks for all this.

I took a look around and went to www.favicon.com - they’ve got some instructions, and a lot of sales pitch, on how to do it.

In the end I downloaded IconForge from their site for a free 7 day trial and created an icon. Infact, 4 icons:

[list]
[]one which is 16x16 with 16 colours
[]one which is 16x16 with 256 colours
[]one which is 32x32 with 16 colours
[]and one which is 32x32 with 256 colours[/list]
It turns out that an .ICO file is a repository for multiple images - Windows then picks out the size and colour depth that it can support, so in the Favourites list of IE5 and 6 it picks 16x16, but if you drag the page link from IEs navigation bar to your desktop it’ll use the 32x32 icon.

All very clever really.

By the way, just changing the filename extension from .BMP to .ICO isn’t enough, although it’ll look OK locally in Windows Explorer, it won’t work with Favourites.

And then all you have to do is, as you have said, is copy the file favicon.ico to the root of your web site: www.yoursite.com/

IconForge, by the way, seems to want to give the filename extension in UPPERCASE (.ICO), but I had problems with it being recognised by my favourites list unless I renamed the extension in lowercase (.ico). It may just have been me, but then again, who knows!!

To test your icon, make sure your site isn’t in your favourites list, if it is, delete it and then close all instances of IE. Then start IE again. Then add your site to your favourites list. It took a couple of goes (as if there was a timne delay) but now it works.

And to see the results of all my efforts you can bookmark a couple of sites that I have done it to:

www.harlequinsolutions.com
www.abbeyhousegardens.co.uk

I’m not trying to pitch these sites at you, I just wanted to share my wonderful artwork!!! (OK, so what can you do with 16x16 pixels!!!)

Thanks again for all your help and I hope my write-up helps out anyone else looking to make a favicon

Cheers

John :slight_smile:

7

If you’re after making icons, I can recommend downloading the Microangelo program.

8

Hey John,
Those are some pretty nice sites. They look really good. You are quite a good good designer!

Cheers!
Kirupa :rambo:

9

Thanks for your comments, the Harlequin site is my commercial site and took a while to get right, and now it needs more work to get it right again!!

I produce the Abbey House Gardens site for free for friends in our town who live there and open it 8 months a year to visitors and the public - the garden’s are quite famous over here (England) and they have been on TV quite a few times now - even the BBC have a link to the web site!!! It was amazing, when the BBC added a link the number of hits per day went up from about 40 to 450 and has remained fairly constant at that level - just goes to show what a bit of publicity can do!

Now I wonder if anyone out there wants to make a TV show about a tubby 30-something e-learning designer…hmmm…!

Cheers again

John :cyclops:

10

the icon usually also shows up beside the adress in the adress bar which is really cool as well… :nerd: