favicon.ico with macs

i’m going to jump right past the whole pc element involving favicons because there’s more than enough documentation in regards to that. for those of you who don’t know what i’m talking about, i’m referring to those nifty little icons that appear in the address bar of your browser right beside the URL you are currently viewing. that’s a favicon. mine should look like this:

as far as i could tell, this has always been a pain in the ass for mac users to make – i took several minutes looking over each of my current graphic applications and couldn’t find anything that would convert or save anything i made into a *.ico file. after enough looking around i discovered a program that could do it (GraphicConverter), and it only took a few seconds to convert what i had made – a 16 x 16 pixel .bmp file – into a 4-bit (16 colors) windows icon. i uploaded it to my root directory and was good to go. for the most part.

safari, my main browser of choice, would not show my new favicon for the life of me. firefox, internet explorer, camino all had no problems and showed my new bundle of joy without a hitch. it turns out that safari has a little trouble emptying the favicon cache, and simply using the “Empty Cache…” command under the safari menu won’t work. in order to get the new favicon to appear, i had to close safari and then remove the Icon folder which was located at ~/Library/Safari/Icon. you can either move it to the trash, or move it somewhere outside of the Safari directory, which might be good in case something screwy happens, but so far i’ve had no problems.

one other thing web design related: why the fuck did it take me so long to get into CSS? gawd.

One thought on “favicon.ico with macs

  1. hello, this doesnt have much to do with the favicon but i’ll continue.

    i was going through old conform project links, and found the site again. i revived the conform project least summer (conformproject.com) and recently finished the first series.

    just started up something new at Flickr. check out the conform flickr group (http://www.flickr.com/groups/conform/) if you want something to do.

    peace.

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