February 17, 2008

Talk To Frank – dynamic favicon

I keep seeing this advert on TV for a drugs-awareness website called “Talk To Frank“. I popped on in one day while bored just to have a look whether it was about drug info, drug rehab or whatever. Turns out it’s an informational website which includes a number of interactive features, like the ability to upload your own content.

The one thing that I noticed was that they use a dynamic favicon, the icon that your browser uses next to the URL or next to bookmarks of a page. Reading about it, it turns out you can change your favicon dynamically use AJAX (see here). However, what they were using was an even simpler technique. Apparently if you rename an animated .GIF to .ICO, you can use this as your favicon and you get the animated effect. You live and learn huh ?

One Comment So Far ›

  1. Michael Mahemoff on February 17th, 2008

    1

    2. Yeah, each of the techniques has its pros and cons. Anim gif is simplest and doesn’t require JS. The main advantage of the dynamic favicon stuff is you get to control it programmatically, so for example you could start a flashing sequence when you start playing some audio (so people can locate it from another tab). It also works in Opera, whereas anim gifs don’t (I think). Neither technique works in IE though, AFAIK.

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