Default Favorite Icon

[jmalchow]

Suddenly the portions of my website without a favicon.ico have a default little Bluehost logo icon. I think I disagree with this policy... I'd prefer no .ico at all. Or has something strange just occured on my account?

Default icon on site with no icon file: http://joemalchow.com
Site with my icon file: http://dartblog.com

-joe

[Dustin]

Well, the favicon.ico rollout didn't go exactly as planned, but it was more or less added to clean up the apache error logs, which would return tons and tons of errors when apache couldn't load user favicon.ico files.

Basically to fix this, all you need to do is just create a new file, it can be 0k, and just rename it to favicon.ico and that will get rid of the current one. If you want, upload a 16x16 or 32x32 gif instead and rename that to favicon.ico and that would display instead.

I'm not sure yet whether or not they will remove the .ico serverwide, if I hear anything else I'll post it, but for now thats the fix.

[jmalchow]

Grazie belle.

By the by, will a 32x32 gif renamed to ico work on all browsers? Neat trick; new to me.

-joe

[Dustin]

aucun probleme, veuillez demander si vous avez besoin de toute autre chose.

By the by, will a 32x32 gif renamed to ico work on all browsers? Neat trick; new to me.

Yes, it should work in most browsers, unless they are really outdated. It will be scaled down to 16x16 in the bar though.

[2notch]

Here's a favicon that is 32x32 and is transparent. It satisfies Apache's logs and doesn't show anything in the browser bar. Created with GIMP version 2.2.8 and saved as a Microsoft .ico file.

http://www.danielsgrp.net/ico/favicon.ico

Oh yeah, you can't see it! It's there in the upper left corner of your browser. Right click in that area and "save image".
(It really is there)

[smiffy]

You can always make your own icon online. It's a piece of cake. Just upload the image you wish to make an icon and viola! Done. Download the zip and you have your icon.

Include it in your root directory or if you prefer, add this code to your pages:
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.ico" >

http://www.chami.com/html-kit/services/favicon/

(Chami also make a **** good free html editor!)

[-timothyjmullen-]

i replaced the icon in my root directory with my own and it is still showing the default bluehost icon. :\

[Basil]

Probably your cache, navigate to yoursite.com/favicon.ico and ctrl+F5.

[-timothyjmullen-]

yep, my bad.

[Dave]

Well, the favicon.ico rollout didn't go exactly as planned, but it was more or less added to clean up the apache error logs, which would return tons and tons of errors when apache couldn't load user favicon.ico files.

Basically to fix this, all you need to do is just create a new file, it can be 0k, and just rename it to favicon.ico and that will get rid of the current one. If you want, upload a 16x16 or 32x32 gif instead and rename that to favicon.ico and that would display instead.

I'm not sure yet whether or not they will remove the .ico serverwide, if I hear anything else I'll post it, but for now thats the fix.

Why not just do this?

Getting rid of favicon.ico

You can get rid of the unnecessary processing and traffic as well as the error log entries by using the following Apache configuration incantations:

# Don't bother looking for favicon.ico
Redirect 404 /favicon.ico

# Don't bother sending the custom error page for favicon.ico
<Location /favicon.ico>
ErrorDocument 404 "No favicon
</Location>

The Redirect directive causes Apache to immediately generate a 404 error when /favicon.ico is requested, thereby avoiding the stat calls and the error log entries caused by their inevitable failure. Whatever error document would normally be used for these 404 error response is overridden with a brief text message in the Location block.

Unlike the commonly suggested workaround of creating a dummy favicon.ico file, this technique will return the appropriate HTTP status code rather than pretending to send an icon. I don't know of any browsers that will choke on a 0-byte favicon.ico, but lying to the client is bad form – at least when there's no good reason to do so.

Requests for favicon.ico will still be logged in your access log; you could filter them out with conditional logging if so desired (I prefer to keep them in the log). These Apache directives will work fine in VirtualHost blocks, so the Redirect can be applied only for those sites that lack favicons without affecting the functionality of other sites.