| The loneliness of the long distance web constructor |
[May. 31st, 2010|10:51 am] |
[Dry and dusty web-tech post now follows. Probably quite boring. Feel free to skip.]
Today I will be mostly frowning at my computer, trying to make my favicon work on the new web pages I've made.
A favicon, pronounced as in 'brave icon', is the little logo that appears in the address bar, like LiveJournal's pencil that appears above this post. For such a small thing, it creates a disproportionate amount of hassle. For a start, Photoshop does not recognise the .ico file extension, so it's necessary to install a plugin.
Right. Done that:
So why is my favicon still greyed out as 'unreadable' in my image folder?
Is there something else I need to do? Is it something simple, like restart the computer? Or is it something arcane and bewildering that Nobody Ever Tells You About?
[One of the things I've learned in my adventures in web construction is that there's always something arcane and bewildering that Nobody Ever Tells You About.]
For now, as I can't use an .ico format image, I've used a .gif file extension to fling up a favicon as a temporary thing: have a look at one of my new pages and you might see it. Favicons with a .gif extension don't work in all browsers, apparently. They also look a bit weedy compared to an .ico image.
Compare the .gif version of the favicon with the .ico version that I successfully used on the older pages, which were built on my clunky old PC, and you'll see the .ico version is a bit bolder and, well, better:
Older page with proper-job .ico favicon: http://www.nemesis.to/live.htm
A new page with temporary, can't-get-the-proper-one-to-work .gif favicon: http://www.nemesis.to/links.htm
Then again, favicon images with the .ico extension don't necessarily work in all browsers, either. There are problems with Internet Explorer, for example.
[One of the other things you learn as a web-constructor is that there are always problems with Internet Explorer.]
This page contains a how-to-make-a-favicon tutorial - I've been looking up loads of this sort of stuff to see if anyone's got a fix for my particular problem, and so far nobody has. But I loved the bit at the bottom of the page, which says this:
From experience, whether a site's favicon shows up in IE or not depends on so many variables that it's best regarded as a random occurrence.
Given that .ico is a Windows file format in the first place, that's a nice irony.
Anyway. I think I'll shut everything down now and go and work on some technology I can understand. My Land Rover needs an oil change, and that's something I can do, not least because if all else fails I can use a Big Hammer on it.
Normal service of amusing rock star photos will resume when I reboot.... |
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| Comments: |
I might be missing the bleedin' obvious, but...
Can't you just use the .ico file you already have? Why do you need to open it in Photoshop?
If you do need to create / edit one, surely there must be a bitmap format that Photoshop can work with - can't you edit/save it as a 16x16 bitmap and simply rename it to .ico afterwards?
It's not a problem I've had myself, I use GIMP for graphics stuff.
The original file is on my PC. I needed to save it onto my Mac, in order for it to appear on the new web pages I'm building on the Mac. So I emailed it to myself from the PC, opened the email on the Mac, and saved the image in the folder with all the other images I'm using on the new pages. And it came up greyed out. The only reason I could think of for this was that the version of Photoshop I've got on the Mac didn't have the .ico file plugin - although you're right - why that should affect an image that's just gone straight into a folder without going anywhere near Photoshop is a mystery. Photoshop shouldn't be an issue here at all. The only other possibility is that my Mac itself can't handle the .ico file extension. But surely that can't be right. There's a Mac-specific favicon tutorial here that makes it all look easy. There's certainly no fix necessary because Macs can't see the essential file format. Meanwhile, my .ico file is still unreadable and I'm still stumped!
Meanwhile, my .ico file is still unreadable and I'm still stumped!
Unreadable by which program? By the program you use to put it on the web server? The fact that the file doesn't open in PS (or any other program on your computer) doesn't mean it's unreadable, it just means that you don't have a program that knows how to display/edit it. Any program that is agnostic to the file format (for example a program that just copies things to a server) shouldn't care that it doesn't know what an .ico file is.
It seems to be unreadable by anything. If I look in the images folder, which has 'All readable documents' enabled as default, there it is, greyed out. It's a classic case of Computer Says No. But...wait a minute. I just replaced the .gif version of the image with the .ico version on my Links page, really just to try again in a 'here goes nothing' kind of way. And now... http://www.nemesis.to/links.htm...it's working. How did that happen? What did I do? Why does it work now when it didn't before? Aaargh! I do hate it when this happens. Perhaps I'd better say no more about it. I don't want to jinx it now that the computer-elves have decided to stop messing with my mind. I don't even want to look in the image folder, in case the file changes back to greyed-out while I'm looking at it. The elves are like that, the little rascals. I think, by the time I've finished this website, I'm going to be completely irrational. I'll be twitching randomly and seeing elves out of the corners of my eyes. Inexplicable things like this will make me finally tip over into outright loopiness...
I'm a PC user and have no knowledge of Macs, so my advice might be rubbish. However, this is my reading of the situation:
The file was probably greyed out because the OS didn't have any application associated with it. If it's now un-greyed, it's probably that you have rebooted since installing the Photoshop plugin, so the OS now knows PS can open .ico files.
I don't quite understand what you mean by adding the icon files on each page. Normally I just stick a favicon in the root directory of the website, the pages pick it up from there. However, I create XHTML / CSS / JS files directly in a text editor - are you using some sort of web authoring application that asks you to specify the favicon file for each page?
One other point worth mentioning is that although I have favicon files on my websites, they aren't used if I point my browser at a local copy of the website - only on the actual, live website. | |
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