The Dastardly "favicon.ico not found" Error
August 3, 1999
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There have been two burning questions among developers
recently: "What is that favicon.ico not found error that is
filling my Error_log?" and "How do I get a custom icon next to my
bookmark link in Internet Explorer?" These may sound like unrelated
questions, yet both can be answered at the same time.
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No, you're not going crazy and no one is hacking into
your site, adding mysterious little snippets for your error
logs to report as missing. The dastardly "favicon.ico not
found" that you see in your error logs is actually Internet
Explorer 5 at work. IE automatically looks for a file it
thinks you should have whenever someone creates a
bookmark or a shortcut to a page on your site. If you
surf with Internet Explorer you've probably noticed that some
of your bookmarked sites have custom icons while others have
the default IE icon. Those custom icons are the
favicon.ico that IE is so diligently searching for.
In addition to appearing in the Favorites menu,
the favicon.ico replaces the default IE icon in the Address
bar at the top of the browser. If you're using IE5, you
can check this out right now by hopping over to the
WDVL homepage. When the file is not found
IE5 uses the default icon and you get an error message in your
log files.
All right, mystery solved, but what can you do about it?
The easiest way to get your server to stop reporting the
file as not found is to put it on your server. As a bonus,
your site will then have that cool little custom icon!
And that's what we're going to do here
today. We'll look at converting your logo to an icon, where
to place it on your server and how to tell IE where it's
located.
Contents:
Preparing the Image
Creating the Icon
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