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Friday, 18 August 2006

Favicons: ico file hosting






I've updated my post on how to include favicons in your blog (the little pic in the address bar, Favorites or bookmarks toolbar etc), to:
  • mention Fileden, a free file host which accepts favicon .ico files and which, so far, seems to be working fine for my own blog (the new Blogger beta still doesn't allow you to upload .ico files to Blogspot's servers, yah boo sucks), and
  • add in a point about including an extra "shortcut icon" line of code in order for the favicon to show in Internet Explorer Favorites as well as in the address bar.

8 comments:

Scott said...

If you have a Google account you can host files on Google Pages and link to them.
If you upload the file you'll see it in the 'uploaded stuff' panel on the right. Simply right click on it an you will have the path directly to your file. Then you can use that link in your instructions.
You get up to 100MB so there's lots of room for .ico files.

Improbulus said...

Nice idea, Scott, but unfortunately it doesn't work on Google Pages - I tried it some time ago. See this link for instance. You don't get the favicon icon, just a Google icon.

According to my Magical Sheep pardner Kirk, it's because of the way Google have set things up (and who knows why they've done it in that way). Google Pages doesn't erver an .ico file with the correct MIME type. They server it as content type application/octet-stream. It's the same with Javascript files but for some reason it doesn't matter that they are served with the wrong mime type - but it does seem to matter with ico files and also with CSS files (which you can't reference from an external webpage either, because they don't server it as text but as application/octet-stream). The browsers won't accept them, at least in his limited testing of it. So uploading CSS files to Google Pages to use as external stylesheets doesn't work either.

Mr. Spog said...

I was just playing around with a favicon newly uploaded to Fileden and found that it was taking anywhere from a few seconds to maybe a minute to load the icon into my browser (i.e. as an isolated image, not embedded in my blog's web page). I don't want to slow down my blog that much for the sake of a measly little favicon! By comparison, Photobucket is fetching a small gif image almost instantaneously, but unfortunately they do not seem to accept favicons...

Mr. Spog said...

...Although, repeatedly reloading your own page, I get the impression that the page will display satisfactorily before the favicon you have stored at Fileden becomes available (and is shown in the address bar). So maybe this is not a major problem.

Mr. Spog said...

Nope! The next time I tried reloading your page, the favicon did not display at all, even once the page was fully loaded, though the rest of the page was displayed correctly. My browser (a slightly outdated version of Opera) must have given up waiting for the icon to appear when Fileden was particularly slow.

Improbulus said...

Thanks for the info Mr Spog, sorry I'm so late in my response! Will have to rethink Fileden, clearly, though I guess it'll do for now.

Anonymous said...

You can try fileden but it not keeping your favico so long, in my experience, they keep your file about 3 months and then delete it!

Anonymous said...

The problem with fileden is that you have to login every 30 days for them to keep your accounts. The problem with that is the series of ad pages they run before you can get to your stuff. Once I inadvertently clicked on "accept and to go to next page." I didn't realize it until I got an unsolicited charge on my phone bill for a service I neither wanted nor needed. It took me months of headache to get the problem corrected. Of course, the supposed confirmation went to my gmail spam folder (along with the other hundreds of spam I get daily.) I'm very cautious with fileden and am looking for an alternative.