A classmate has designed a favicon for our site. How do I replace the existing one with a new one?
Beckie

Good and rarely asked question. You can't. At least, you can't yet. Favicons have to exist at root, and for us root is the same for everyone. Although a restructuring will allow us to allow you to upload your own favicons. It's not high on our priority list though honestly, so you likely won't be able to use your own custom favicon until sometime into next year. The ability is coming though.

I appreciate your very speedy reply. Thanks.

I hate to apprear too dumb, but just what is a favicon? Favorite icon?

The favicon is the icon that appears in the browser address/URL bar. Right now, everyone's favicon is the ClassCreator symbol. If we could change the favicon for our website, then we could have the mascot or something else be the favicon.

Thanks

I've got my favicon ready - any movement on implementing it?

Nope! It looks like there's a few dozen tasks above it. You guys here keep suggesting too many cool things.

Checking on the status of this. I just purchased my domain/premium membership and I noticed it wasn't implemented yet.

This was pushed back about a mile to make way for many other more important things, but it is something we'll look into after the launch of some major system upgrades currently ongoing.

Brad,
I tried a workaround to get the favicon.ico to show up in my browser. I tried this in my user forum as a topic to generate a test webpage, and it seems to work.

1) Create a 16x16 favicon.ico, but save it as favicon_ico.gif. This is needed because *.ico isn't a valid extention for upload.

2) Upload it to your images directory.

3) Use the following html code in the webpage to redirect the browser to find it:

I saved the forum topic, reloaded the webpage, and I can see the icon in my address bar. Favicon setup sites say to use the html in the "head" tag, but it seems to work this way, too. I only tested this on Firefox 3.5.11, so I'm not sure what other browsers will do.

Is this a valid workaround?

Hey!

Nice job, James -- worked in Chrome, IE and Firefox! for me.

You posted it in your Forums? Couldn't you paste it on your home page as source?

Thanks for the quick test, John.

It might not work for you now, because I went back and edited my post to put a codeblock around the html so it wouldn't try to render in the browser and would display here instead.

Testing in my user forums is something that comes from being in the IT field for years. I always use a test environment first before publishing on the home page. I also want to make sure it's valid with Brad before it goes into production on the home page.

I'll check with Rick on this tomorrow, but give it a whirl on your home page James. You can't break anything by trying it. This may actually be of assistance to Rick as he comes up with a favicon method. Very cool that you even attempted this, thank you.

Brad Switzer wrote:

Thanks, Brad.

I put it up on the home page, and it's working nicely. I can see it in my Firefox tabs, too. It only shows on the home page that has the html code and nowhere else on the site, but it looks nice.

All right that's absolutely awesome. Very nice! Now go put it in the Google Analytics box on your Preferences page. Let's see if that puts the favicon on every page.

Brad Switzer wrote:

John Chidester had the same idea, Brad. He put it up on his website using the Google Analytics box, and it looks like it works fine.

I'm not the "ROOT" admin for my site, so I'll ask her to do the same thing and let you know how it turns out.

Very nice James. Thanks!

Brad --

You looking for more help? James is one clever guy!

Take a look at this latest enhancement at his website.

CLICK HERE

Scott Mastenbrook wrote:

You're welcome, Scott. I think what sent me "googling" to find this is the comment about the favicon.ico needing to be in the root directory, which seems to have been a restriction at one time, but not any more. I found most of the writeup here useful, including the code to link to an alternate location for it: Favicon Wikipedia article

I found the extra workaround for IE here:
IE extra code They describe the type="image/ico" code needed for IE browsers.

If it's easy enough to add to the Google Analytics box to make it work, it might become just another feature you could put in the administrator section to upload the image and link to it automatically.

John Chidester wrote:

Thanks, John, but imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I "borrowed" that idea from the Dixie High School 1994 site: Dixie High School Class of 1994

so I've implemented a favicon upload this morning under the "Edit School/Logos" admin link.

I used the exact same html code that James used.

I created a 16x16 favicon GIF image and uploaded it.

And it shows up in Firefox and Safari but not IE or Google Chrome.

When I look at James' site, his favicon - which is also a GIF image - shows up in IE, Firefox, and Safari (but still not Chrome)

I'm not sure what the difference is but I'm going to continue working at it. If some GIF images work and some don't, this could be a support nightmare. I'm going to try JPG, PNG, and actual ICO files (I can't seem to make an ICO file with my ancient version of photoshop so I'll just download one from somewhere)

Alright so I had the same issue with all of the other formats... none of them showed up in IE.

So, I actually went to this web site:

Your text to link here...

And uploaded my favicon.gif and it converted it to a favicon.ico ... I then uploaded that to my web site

And it worked in IE, Firefox, and Safari

(side note, apparently Chrome doesn't show favicons)

Rick:

Chrome displaying my favicon: http://screencast.com/t/R1RFkXAe

In PhotoShop, play around with 8bit 16bit and make sure the MODE is not set to CYMK.

Working with James, I created this step-by-step -- CLICK HERE

Thanks for making it MUCH easier -- and doing it so fast!

But you've already got it set up on Edit School/Logo... I'll try that out, too.

Worked like a charm, Rick: Chrome and all CLICK HERE

I realized that Chrome actually puts the favicon in the title bar not the address bar like other browsers =)

Okay, I made the final adjustment.

The icon upload actually uses our image resizer to convert all uploaded files to .ICO files... so you can upload GIF, BMP, TIF, JPG, or PNG (or ICO) ... in order to combat any potential issues with people saving jpg files as ICO files and stuff, *all* uploads will get converted and resized to be no more than 32x32 - and the images are required to be either 32x32 or 16x16.

Anyone who does not have an icon uploaded will get the default favicon which is now blank, instead of being the classcreator favicon.

John Chidester wrote:

Lol. Look at when this topic was entered.

Quote:

I dunno about FAST

Rick, We won't count the "on the list until we can get to it" against the stop watch.

I mean FAST from when James first posted his idea on
Quote:

Just to clarify how I converted the image -

I run GIMP under OpenSuse Linux for my image editor.
I started with a .JPG image, resized it for 16x16, then saved it as a Windows .ICO file. GIMP picked up the file extension and converted it to the .ICO file. I took the defaults of 8 bpp, 1-bit alpha, 256-slot palette, and saved the file.

What I wound up doing was renaming the extension as .GIF to do the upload, because for some reason, the uploader rejected the .ICO as an invalid file extension.

So what appeared to be a .GIF was really my renamed .ICO Windows icon. I don't know if that caused any confusion with what you were testing in the different browsers, so I thought I'd point that out.

JAMES AGRIPPE wrote:

Well, that explains the mystery!!! Thanks.

There appears to be two forums on this topic. I'll post on the other one under New Features.

I agree... let's move the discussion to the main topic thread.

Please CLICK HERE.