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favicon.ico 24 January 2000

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If you run a web server, no doubt you've seen entries in your logs like this:

"GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 404 3711

That bothered me for quite some time. Then I went searching to find an answer. I found it at http://www.favicon.com/.

And don't forget to read How to create favicon-icons on Unix machines.

What is it?

This is an advanced browser feature. It allows for an icon pertaining to the site to be recorded against your bookmark. That''s quite nice, but some browsers seem to request a favicon from each and every page they visit. That is not nice. But I've caved in and I've given up. I have to have a favicon.ico. My nerves are running ragged from seeing that message in my error logs. I awake in the middle of the night wondering how to fix it.

I went searching on the freebsd mailing list.and found help from John Russell jr@paranoia.demon.nl who sent me samples/favicon.ico, for which I am grateful. John claims to have obtained this icon from the Hummingbird/Exceed PC inetd program.

If you want to see what the graphics looks like, this page has two sizes, one is quite small (10KB) and the other is a bit sizey (45KB).

What do I do with it?

Put your favicon.ico in the directory of your choice. I put mine in the root directory of my website. You can also use a different icon on different pages if you prefer. I snatch this from http://www.favicon.com/:

<HEAD>
<LINK REL="SHORTCUT ICON" HREF="http://www.example.org/myicon.ico" type="image/x-icon">
<LINK REL="SHORTCUT"      HREF="http://www.example.org/myicon.ico" type="image/x-icon">
<TITLE>My Title</TITLE>
</HEAD>

What you'll see now

The next time someone requests your favicon.ico, you'll be happy in the knowledge that you are spreading the BSD Daemon image around. And you'll also see this in your logs:

"GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.0" 304 -

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