Can we change the Meta Tag Information and favicons for the site?

The meta tags are all currently optimized for peak findability in the major search engines and cannot be changed. Can I ask what you're wishing to change them to?

I defer to Rick Root about your favicon question. Right now I know it's showing the Class Creator icon, but really should show no icon at all. Or maybe even a way to put in your own possibly. Rick? Oh Riiiiick?

i REALLY like the favicon idea Perhaps a spot to load one up when you are loding your class logo, or MAYBE even better - a favicon is created/loaded when you upload your logo....??? Just a thought

Aloha

Derry

Hmmmmmmm. I have two concerns about this:

1) If we auto generate a favicon, many school logos will not lend themselves well to it. For example, your own logo would make an awful favicon. A favicon is a 16 x 16 square, and it cannot have very much detail. If you try to make one out of someting with lots of detail such as your logo, you'll basically get a 16 x 16 square of moosh that doesn't really look like anything. For this reason I'm against the ideas of auto generating favicons from the logo.

2) We could allow people to make their own .ico image and upload them, but I guarantee you 99% of people will have no clue how to make a favicon. Thus I hesitate to put up a spot for one, as I don't think 99 out of 100 people can or will use it. I'm not against putting it somewhere in the system though. We have a new Preferences area coming out shortly. Maybe we can put this and another other advanced thing in an "Advanced Preferences" area that can be expanded out from under the regular Preferences area.

One thing that's very important is always maintaining the usability of the system and not putting in things that will be a source of confusion for the majority of users. Ask 100 typical web users what a favicon is, and you'll maybe find 1 who knows. I'm totally open to putting in more advanced stuff like this -- its just got to be in a place where people understand they're looking at advanced features, and that the advanced features are all optional.

What say you Rick?

Now I'm responding to my own post before anybody can get a word in edgewise.

I just made a favicon out of your logo and attahced it to this post. Take a look. I guess it doesn't look THAT bad. All of the detail is gone of course, but it still sort of looks like your logo and represents your colors, etc. Would you want this to be your favicon? If this is good enough for you, then I would guess maybe auto generated favicons from logos would work "good enough" for most schools, as most school logos are going to have less detail than yours. So I guess in a sense yours is kind of a worst case scenario example.

Anyway -- I don't even know if it's possible yet to auto generate favicons from a logo and have them display for each site with a domain name. I'm an idea guy -- you'll all find out that Rick and Mike are the real brains of this whole thing. We keep Mike so swamped he can't participate in the forums, but lemme see if I can drag Rick in here to shed some light on all of this.

There are plenty of free sites where you can generate a favicon and then save it to your hard drive for uploading. I use this one all thetime:

http://www.rw-designer.com/online_icon_maker.php

My logo did not look good as an icon and so I used part of the logo to create the attached file.

We might be able to allow unique favicons for unique domain names IF you upload a special favicon.ico image .. auto-resizing a logo to use for favicon files might not be a good idea.

Anyway, I'm researching the possibility, and as I said it will probably only work if your class has a custom domain name.

After some thought, I'm for the idea of trying automated fav icons from logos if it's even possible Rick. But I'm also for the idea of allowing people to override their auto-generated fav icon by uploading their own in the Advanced Preferences area so people like Dave above can make a cleaner one if desired.

Wow...those were some well thought out posts! I too have used several websites to create favicons...I do like your idea of trying to allow the user to have the option of auto-generate or load up their own...and of course, all these favicon creating sites would be listed in this awesome forum

Aloha

Derry

Jumping in here... You are correct that 99 out of 100 people wouldn't know what to do with a favicon. However I'd bet that that 1 out of 100 is the guy that gets tapped to run this website. Take me for example...

In our case, I already have a favicon that's the "P" off the football helmets. You folks know the movie, "Friday Night Lights"? Yeah, that's my school...

Has any more thought been given to favicons?

Thanks!

Hi Steve,

We still have that on a long wish list. It is not high on the current list of priorities but we do still have it on there.

Thanks for the update.

Steve

Jessica, Support wrote:

I've created my own favicon. Has that wish list shortened? I am attaching...

~Vic in Texas (I'm the pain-in-the-backside CSS coder)

No. But we'll get back to favicons at some point. Current priorities are to launch Live Chat, Instant Messaging, and Community Photo Galleries.