logon2 Blog

If you don’t know what favicons are, look up at your tabs. You’ll notice that some of them, or at least this one, will have an icon. These are called ‘favicons’ (short for “Favourite” icon) . You might notice some tabs that don’t have a favicon. To me, sites with favicons seem more professional, complete and polished. Also, they make it easier for me to negotiate my tabs. Have a look at my tabs at the moment:

Notice how one of them has no favicon and a particularly unhelpful title. Now I’ll have to click on that tab (or press CTRL+3, or whatever)
to find out what it is – how annoying, I shouldn’t have to do this.

Because I can tell that you’re smart – I know that you want to use favicons on your site. It’s pretty easy – just create the icon and add some codeThe easiest way to get some favicon action is to use an online ico generator, here are some:

• Favicon.cc
• Dynamic Drive FavIcon Generator
• Favicon.co.uk

Then just add a some lines of code to your template:

<link rel="icon" href="http://yoursite.tld/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon">

It’s worth noting that some browsers automatically search for “favicon.ico” on the document root of your website so it might be a good idea to name it “(httpdocs)/favicon.ico”. If you don’t want to do that, you can save it anywhere and just use a PNG file, just change the MIME type:

<link rel="icon" href="http://yoursite.tld/favicon.ico" type="image/png">

I personally prefer to edit my favicons locally, so I can make them transparent and high resolution for extra shine. Keep your eyes out for a post on that.

It’s possible that you’re thinking, “Processing PHP in CSS? That’s plain stinks.,” just from reading the heading. It does stink, but so does maintaining two CSS files, updating your colour scheme manually (or even by sed), changing common dimensions, and all the other crap that goes with static files. Think about it this way – would you build a site out of many HTML files or would you use some kind of template system (like Pretty Smarties)? By now I hope you’re less sceptical. If you’re interested, please read on. (more…)

When I moved across to XHTML a few years ago, the transition was mostly quite easy. Using thesse logical rules got me though 90% of the transition:

1. Close all tags, use lower-case tags, use lower-case attributes and maintain nesting order.
2. Markup is for content, CSS is for presentation. That one was easy.
3. Use the right tag for the right job (in the right place) and make things accessible.

However, one thing that can’t be covered by a general rule is the complete removal of tags. Most removed tags were non-standard and started out as proprietary – like <marquee> and the tag we’re going to talk about, <embed>. (more…)

Pretty Smarties

Lovely Caption Maker

This is the simple PHP template system which integrates Pretty URLs and Smarty Templates. The release is only two months later than I said, but I’ve made the release fairly decent. Here’s a rundown on the system: (more…)

After about two months of the logon2 blog, it’s time to check the statistics. After a bit of inspection and investigation, I found an interesting (but kind of obvious) pattern that brings a load of new traffic over and over again… (more…)

In the last two or three weeks, something that had been long awaited had finally arrived. Google finally allowed webmasters to set the geographic region of the primary audience of a website. (more…)

If you have the time and you’re willing to design your own website, you can get one for free! Here’s the info on what you get, and how to do it… (more…)