> I found the below article which explains the mysterious Error 404 > FAVICON.ICO entry that started showing up recently in the Failure Report > section of my Analog stats. It's caused by a new feature in Internet > Explorer 5 (see below article for more detail). In short its caused when > users bookmark one of your pages while using IE 5. See below for details. > > Ed Kabat Web Platform Engineering Team (WPET) Infrastructure Services Organization (ISO) Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS) [EMAIL PROTECTED] 317-510-5872 DSN 699-5872 > http://www.internetday.com/archives/051499.html > > Those of us that analyze our server logs began to notice a > strange > phenomenon in early 1999. It happened to me the same > way it happened to > everyone else. > > A bizarre entry started showing up in our log files: > > > /favicon.ico 404 file not found > > What was this? I had never heard of this file > before. Why were people looking > for it on my sites and why so many? > > And this wasn't just one site. It was *all* of my > sites. > > I quickly dismissed any wild notions of some bizarre > conspiracy to confuse me > and began to investigate. After doing a bit of > research and calling a few of my > secret contacts, I finally discovered what it meant > and it was quite cool. > > Internet Explorer 5.0 has an awesome new feature > that really benefits > aggressive webmasters. It allows you to include an > icon with your site listing > that is displayed when someone bookmarks your site. > > So, instead of that little page with the Internet > Explorer logo, your site will > display your icon. > > That is powerful! One of the problems with bookmarks > is that it seems people > don't go back to them. If your site stands out from > the list with a distinctive > icon, do you think it will affect the number of > times it gets clicked? > > You bet! > > So, this is where the favicon.ico mystery comes > from. Those little entries you > see in your log file come from IE 5.0 surfers > bookmarking your page. > > So, how do you fix it? > > It's really easy. It will just take a little bit of > your time. > > Here are some hard and fast rules for getting this > to work on your site: > > 1. IE 5.0 expects the favicon.ico file to reside in > the directory of the page being > bookmarked. Put one in *every* directory on your > site. > > Here's an example of the one we use at the Killer > Tactics site: > > http://www.killertactics.com/favicon.ico > > 2. The favicon.ico file *must* be in the following > format according to Microsoft. > Now, I've seen other formats work, but it might be > best not to tempt fate: > > 16 colors in the palette > > 16x16 pixels in size > > Now, that doesn't give you a lot of freedom, but I'm > not complaining. It's a great > feature. > > 3. Icons generally have to be created using an icon > editor. Your standard image > editor probably won't support it. You can find one > quite easily at any good > software site. > > That's it. For those of you out there that are > really motivated, this is a great tool > to help you stand out from the crowd. > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ This is the analog-help mailing list. To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe analog-help" in the main BODY OF THE MESSAGE. List archived at http://www.mail-archive.com/analog-help@lists.isite.net/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------
