Favicons: ico file hosting

Friday, August 18, 2006

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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.

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7 Comment(s):

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.

(By Scott, at Sunday, August 20, 2006 7:21:00 AM) Edit Comment

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.

(By Improbulus, at Sunday, August 20, 2006 9:13:00 AM) Edit Comment

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...

(By Mr. Spog, at Sunday, September 10, 2006 2:02:00 AM) Edit Comment

...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.

(By Mr. Spog, at Sunday, September 10, 2006 2:10:00 AM) Edit Comment

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.

(By Mr. Spog, at Sunday, September 10, 2006 2:21:00 AM) Edit Comment

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.

(By Improbulus, at Monday, December 11, 2006 10:57:00 PM) Edit Comment

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!

(By Anonymous, at Tuesday, April 08, 2008 12:07:00 AM) Edit Comment