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Favicons For Pro(’s)

For the Advanced Learner, there are a few more options available. For one thing, you can use Tim Plumb’s brilliant Action entitled …well, FavIcon.

The FavIcon action lets you do two things different from basic useage: 1) You can choose to upload your Favicon to the Resources folder, thus enabling you to have more than one Favicon on one site, if you’re using a setup with Separate Resource Folders. Useful? Perhaps not for all, but it can be. 2) You can choose to make your Favicon a different filetype than the bog standard. Although it does mean that your Favicon may not show up on every platform or indeed in every browser… wait a minute- isn't that how it works already? (hmm.)

Say you would like to use a 24-bit PNG file as FavIcon, for instance. Why? Because it gives more detail, better color fidelity and, wait for it, you can use Alpha channel transparency. What? Why? Well, shoosh, there are a few versions of the Mozilla (Gecko) browser which will allow your Favicon to appear on the window tab with transparency, when tabbed browsing is invoked. So? What? It looks snazzy!

How Does It Work?

Well, you surf over to Tim Plumb’s site FreewayActions.com and look for the Action called “FavIcon”. Download it, say ‘Thank You, Tim’, put the decompressed Action file in your Freeway Actions/Standard folder. Hopefully you’ve already made a folder for all the 3rd party Actions you’ve collected - if not do so first. I, for example, have a folder in the Standard folder called 3rd Party Actions. Simple. Pop the Action in there, then open your site document. On any page (the smart move is to use a Master Page), apply the action by going to top menubar/Page/Actions and select FavIcon.

For details on how to use the Action, read the info on Tim’s site, then look at the Action interface in the Actions palette when you’ve applied it. It’s dirt simple.

One thing to remember: The Favicon, regardless of filetype, will not show on local Preview (except, actually it will in some Mozillla browsers like Firefox) unless you’re using your local Apache server for dynamic pages. It will only be visible when it and the pages using it is uploaded to the web. This is true for both the Standard way and this “more advanced” way. Also keep in mind that it will not show —no matter what you do— in IE 5.x. There may also be other “minor” browsers which can have problems displaying PNG Favicons. As always on the web, your safest bet is to use either GIF or JPEG if you don’t want to settle for the ICO type.