OK, favatars implemented, pretty much. I’ve blown them up to 40×40; not sure if this is a good idea, and I’ll remove it if I need to. But now you all get little icons next to your comment if you leave a URL, and that URL has a favicon. The “no icon” icon needs to be a lot better, but I’m in a rush right now. The whole damned site needs a redesign, I think. Nice simple little Python CGI, though. I love Python, in case you hadn’t realised.
Update: how the magic was done.
And this is Favatars, written , and concerning Web
Comments
sil
sil
It’s weird. Wish I understood imaging stuff.
Simon Willison
Gotta have a play with this…
Simon Willison
That’s really cool :) Doesn’t like transparencies very much (it renders them black instead of white) – any way you can fix that?
Simon Willison
(reads up. feels sheepish.)
Raanan Avidor
Hi.
Great idea!
sil
Simon: I’m working on it. Any assistance gratefully taken and used :)
Note the update above with a link to an explanation, so you can steal the code if you prefer.
Chris Beach
Let’s try mine..
Nice idea by the way!
mrben
Damn. Now I need to get a favicon. Plus the fact that I share my site with someone else means we both have to use the same favatar….
sil
mrben: yeah, I know. This is the problem that gravatars were meant to solve, and they do that rather neatly; I’m just not using them for reasons mentioned in posts passim. This whole favatar thing is a hack and no mistake. :)
Gary Fleming
You should probably display them inline with the name, rather than above. Currently, the are perceived as grouped with the above permalink which makes them look rather out of place.
Still nice work.
Gary Fleming
Of course that last favicon looks totally wrong because I bollocksed up my URL in an earlier comment and didn’t notice until now. At least I’ve demonstrated the power of visual stimuli.
Paul
Looks neat and cool
Matthew
jsut to see it working
Paul
Oh, my favicon has gone missing :(
What I was going to do was a version of what Aquarion did with links in his journal to Livejournal but have favicons pulled from the linked URL in question. Been on my project list for months and now you’ve done half the work for me :)
Kevin
want to see mine!
sil
Kevin: yours doesn’t work, apparently because the Python Imaging Library doesn’t support your favicon.ico: it says “IOError: Unsupported BMP pixel depth“. Don’t know why, sorry, but I don’t think that there’s anything that I can do about that…
Mathieu 'P01' HENRI
testing
andrew
Very nice! You wrote before about the cgi script caching favicons, although the load time makes it seem like not cached. Am I seeing a lag from script execution or from remote image retrieval?
sil
andrew: not sure. I think it’s script execution, since the caching thing works pretty quickly. Er. I think. It’s difficult to tell, because the browser caches the images as well…
Xiven
That’s pretty nice. I may need to borrow this idea. Not sure how easy it is to read .ico files with PHP, but we’ll see.
Rob
It’s not that I don’t believe you, but I thought I’d better do a test and see if I’m the winner in the ‘most boring icon’ competition.
Rob
Nuts. It didn’t work.
Senji
There should be an obvious way of editing your “being rememberedness“, rather than having to “Forget Me” (which I just had to do to add a URL).
Also, I m going to have to fudge up my URL since I’d usually give my lj there, but that doens’t have an appropriate favicon… :-)
Senji
Oh, and since most favicons are 16×16 with optional 32×32 copies then 32×32 might be a better size to blow them up to (or 64×64).
sil
Rob: works now. Not sure what went wrong there; it obviously didn’t work for some reason and then cached the failure…
sil
Senji: good idea on the 32×32 thing, and implemented.
Tom
Just wanted a go too.
Bryan Price
This sound’s pretty cool. I’ll have a try then.
Adam Rice
Nice. I’ve got to see this in action
J$
Just testing.
Aquarion
Neat idea
sil
Aquarion: the script doesn’t currently support the inline SHORTCUT ICON link tag. Need to update it for that.
Syam Kumar
testing… :-)
sparkes
Rewinding a little and expanding on the idea for using autodiscovered foaf I have suggested using autodiscovery to export your chosen avatar.
Perhaps you could check for this before going for the favicon to give everyone the choice of avatars in better formats.
Lars
Just checking to see what favicon formats are supported.
Lars
Hm, a link relation value of “icon” doesn’t seem to be supported. How come?
sil
Lars: laziness on my part, really. It would make parsing a bit slower if, in addition to looking for rootofserver/favicon.ico, I have to fetch the supplied URL and parse it for the rel=icon tag. I will probably do it at some point…
Eric
Okay, I’ll try it. If the results are what I expect, then I’ll have to think seriously about stealing this for my own site…
sil
Eric: looks to have worked. Steal away, although I don’t know how well the code generalises. Of course, stealing the principles and doing your own implementation is perfectly fine if the code can’t be used directly.
Eivind
Really neat idea! Just testing here, really.
Nils
Cool idea.
Aquarion
This is a test, because my /favicon.ico is now a “303 – See Other” link, and I’m curious as to whether it works :-)
sil
Aquarion: seems not. :)
I’ll look at that :)
ThaNerd
This is only a test. I repeat: ONLY A TEST!
sil
ThaNerd: your favicon doesn’t seem to work, because the Python Imaging Library says “Unsupported BMP pixel depth“. I don’t really know what this means, I’m afraid…
Titus
Great idea !
ThaNerd
sil, my favicon uses the new icon bitdepth that was introduced with Windows XP, the 32 bits colors format (24 bits + 8 bits alpha channel)... As far as i know, it is supported on windows XP built-in, but if i don’t mistake, Firefox (which displays the icon even without bookmarking the website) supports that icon format in all operating system, even those older than Windows 2000…
But i’m not sure, though…
I’ll check wether image magick is able to convert from 32-bits ico to alpha png…
Yan
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Gringo
I will test it…
Oh, and, yes, I need to work out what’s going on with the Python Imaging Library turning transparent icon backgrounds into black. Don’t know what that’s all about.