favicon trouble

[alice]

I'm trying to create a favicon which I've done before, and it just
won't show up. I've even saved the file as a gif and entered the URL
of where the file is according to my FTP program, and I get a File
Cannot Be Found error. I've copied the pixels from the file and pasted
them into a favicon that is working and showing up, renamed it by just
adding a number to the end, and still it won't show up, either as
an .ico or a .gif. So I've determined it's not the file name, but
somthing wrong with the file itself. Can anyone tell me what I should
be looking for?

[Andy Dingley]

On 30 Jan, 18:05, "alice" <[e-mail]:

Can anyone tell me what I should be looking for?

How about a URL to the site? 8-(

[David E. Ross]

alice wrote:

I'm trying to create a favicon which I've done before, and it just
won't show up. I've even saved the file as a gif and entered the URL
of where the file is according to my FTP program, and I get a File
Cannot Be Found error. I've copied the pixels from the file and pasted
them into a favicon that is working and showing up, renamed it by just
adding a number to the end, and still it won't show up, either as
an .ico or a .gif. So I've determined it's not the file name, but
somthing wrong with the file itself. Can anyone tell me what I should
be looking for?

Some browsers will not display the graphic unless it is specifically an
icon (extension .ico). However, GIFs and icons are not formatted the
same. Thus, you can't take a file favicon.gif and rename it favicon.ico.

With Windows, you can take a GIF and display it with Photo Editor.
Resize the image to exactly 16x16 pixels. Then, [Edit Select All] and
[Edit Copy]. Open IconEdit32 and [Edit Paste] into a 16 pixel
workspace. Then, save the result. When I do this, I then resize again
in Photo Editor to 32x32 pixels and paste into a 32 pixel workspace in
IconEdit32, repeating again for 48 pixels.

I generally start with full-color (256-bit) icons. Then, I copy the
icons into IconEdit32 workspaces for 16-bit color and for
black-and-white icons, giving me a full set of nine variations. I find
that manual editing in IconEdit32 at each resolution and at each
color-level always improves the quality of the icon display, even for
16x16 pixel black-and-white icons.

Also, don't forget to put
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="myicon.ICO" type="image/x-icon">
<link rel="icon" href="myicon.ICO" type="image/x-icon">
into the header of your HTML.

Finally, if you are trying to see the icon via Firefox or SeaMonkey,
don't forget to set the preferences:
user_pref("browser.chrome.favicons", true);
user_pref("browser.chrome.load_toolbar_icons", 2);
// display site icons in bookmarks file
// (0=never, 1=when in cache, 2=always)

--

David E. Ross
<http://www.rossde.com/>

I use SeaMonkey as my Web browser because I want
a browser that complies with Web standards. See
<http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/>.