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The Big Red B

Mourne Kransky

12:21 / 16.02.03

Sometimes, when I'm moving from thread to thread on the 'Lith, the little e-document symbol on the extreme left of my address box turns to a big red B. This is a recent phenomenon and I have tried all sorts of manoeuvres online to discover exactly how to make it appear there, but have not yet puzzled it out. Don't think it occurs on any other site or bbs, not that I have noticed anyway.

Have I become, at last, one of the secret mystical order of the Barbe-elect? Can I access the secret threads by clicking on this symbol? Am I hallucinating? Would I hear the music of the spheres if I turned up my speakers?

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

12:39 / 16.02.03

I've seen it too. I've always assumed, what with it being computery stuff and therefore way above my head, I should leave well alone. It goes away too, but I haven't been able to figure out a pattern.

It's probably something really cool that we're missing out on through lack of web fu. But just on the offchance, I'm leaving it. Well. Alone.

tom-karika nukes it from orbit

12:57 / 16.02.03

'Tis Barbelith's bookmark/titlebar icon. Loads of sites have them, they usually appear either in your bookmark listing, on the title bar or even on the edge of the adress bar, if your lucky.

The only place I can think of off-hand which also does it is Slashdot, but there are plenty more.

that

13:00 / 16.02.03

It doesn't do it for me. A couple of sex toy shops do it for me - LoveHoney (a heart) and BodyVibes (the letters BV). But not Barbelith. Is it because I'm not special?

16:12 / 16.02.03

It's called a favicon, and you can draw one yourself if you have a website. All you need is an icon designer which you can download off the net, then save the icon file as "favicon.ico" and save it to the root directory on your site. My pages at here have a favicon what i did draw, along with some other bits of bad tricksy js/ html stuff. That said, I really can't work out why the icon works sometimes and not others. In my experience you can get the icon to appear in the address bar after you've saved the page as a bookmark, and occasionally refreshing the index brings it up. But as browser features go, it's a bit of a pants one.

w1rebaby

16:18 / 16.02.03

It's called a shortcut or favourite icon. Lots of sites have them - the BBC, CNN, Livejournal, Apple, my own site...

For the interested, if you put an image called favicon.ico in the root directory of your site, e.g. this one, most browsers will recognise it for any page with that base URL. However they're a little erratic about what they do with it. Some display it all the time in the window and bookmarks list, some don't.

and you can specify a specific image for a page with the following in the <head> section of the page with...
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="URL of image" />

Mourne Kransky

17:01 / 16.02.03

Thank you, kind & web-fully skilled people. I am reassured by your technical descriptions of what the Big Red B is and does (although, like Stoatie, I am not literate in your tongue).

Great site, iivix. Looks good, works well and full of delightful and unexpected things. Haven't seen poor old Pokey the Penguin in a long time. The xs4all artwork was ace also. Will be back for more.

Right, now I'm off to buy a box of chocolate sandworms for Cholister, so she'll see how special she is (just not as special as me obviously... )

w1rebaby

17:02 / 16.02.03

incidentally, favicon.ico doesn't actually have to be a .ICO file, it can be a GIF, PNG or whatever. Should be 16x16.

The Return Of Rothkoid

20:59 / 16.02.03

If you look at my blog, you should see a fez there.

Yes, you should.

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