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.
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.
Posted by sil on January 31st, 2005.
It’s weird. Wish I understood imaging stuff.
Posted by sil on January 31st, 2005.
Gotta have a play with this…
Posted by Simon Willison on January 31st, 2005.
That’s really cool :) Doesn’t like transparencies very much (it renders them black instead of white) – any way you can fix that?
Posted by Simon Willison on January 31st, 2005.
(reads up. feels sheepish.)
Posted by Simon Willison on January 31st, 2005.
Hi.
Great idea!
Posted by Raanan Avidor on January 31st, 2005.
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.
Posted by sil on January 31st, 2005.
Let’s try mine..
Nice idea by the way!
Posted by Chris Beach on January 31st, 2005.
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….
Posted by mrben on January 31st, 2005.
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. :)
Posted by sil on January 31st, 2005.
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.
Posted by Gary Fleming on January 31st, 2005.
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.
Posted by Gary Fleming on January 31st, 2005.
Looks neat and cool
Posted by Paul on January 31st, 2005.
jsut to see it working
Posted by Matthew on January 31st, 2005.
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 :)
Posted by Paul on January 31st, 2005.
want to see mine!
Posted by Kevin on January 31st, 2005.
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…
Posted by sil on January 31st, 2005.
testing
Posted by Mathieu 'P01' HENRI on January 31st, 2005.
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?
Posted by andrew on January 31st, 2005.
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…
Posted by sil on January 31st, 2005.
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.
Posted by Xiven on January 31st, 2005.
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.
Posted by Rob on January 31st, 2005.
Nuts. It didn’t work.
Posted by Rob on January 31st, 2005.
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… :-)
Posted by Senji on January 31st, 2005.
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).
Posted by Senji on January 31st, 2005.
Rob: works now. Not sure what went wrong there; it obviously didn’t work for some reason and then cached the failure…
Posted by sil on January 31st, 2005.
Senji: good idea on the 32×32 thing, and implemented.
Posted by sil on January 31st, 2005.
Just wanted a go too.
Posted by Tom on January 31st, 2005.
This sound’s pretty cool. I’ll have a try then.
Posted by Bryan Price on February 1st, 2005.
Nice. I’ve got to see this in action
Posted by Adam Rice on February 1st, 2005.
Just testing.
Posted by J$ on February 1st, 2005.
Neat idea
Posted by Aquarion on February 1st, 2005.
Aquarion: the script doesn’t currently support the inline SHORTCUT ICON link tag. Need to update it for that.
Posted by sil on February 1st, 2005.
testing… :-)
Posted by Syam Kumar on February 1st, 2005.
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.
Posted by sparkes on February 1st, 2005.
Just checking to see what favicon formats are supported.
Posted by Lars on February 1st, 2005.
Hm, a link relation value of “icon” doesn’t seem to be supported. How come?
Posted by Lars on February 1st, 2005.
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…
Posted by sil on February 1st, 2005.
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…
Posted by Eric on February 1st, 2005.
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.
Posted by sil on February 1st, 2005.
Really neat idea! Just testing here, really.
Posted by Eivind on February 1st, 2005.
Cool idea.
Posted by Nils on February 2nd, 2005.
This is a test, because my /favicon.ico is now a “303 – See Other” link, and I’m curious as to whether it works :-)
Posted by Aquarion on February 5th, 2005.
Aquarion: seems not. :)
I’ll look at that :)
Posted by sil on February 6th, 2005.
This is only a test. I repeat: ONLY A TEST!
Posted by ThaNerd on February 22nd, 2005.
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…
Posted by sil on February 22nd, 2005.
Great idea !
Posted by Titus on February 27th, 2005.
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…
Posted by ThaNerd on February 28th, 2005.
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Posted by Yan on June 17th, 2005.
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Posted by Risam Yold on June 17th, 2005.
I will test it…
Posted by Gringo on July 29th, 2005.