You may notice that the site now has an icon in the toolbar, and since you've bookmarked it, also in your bookmark menu :-)

The icon is a sandcastle, downloaded from Iconfactory (click pic for link). These guys have great quality freeware icons for "non-commercial use". It's really amazing how talented Mac people are. And how roomy 128x128 feels for an icon.

The reason for adding the icon wasn't so much to make us "trés cool", but to ease the reading of common news sites. I like to store commonly visited news sites in the bookmarks toolbar folder by dragging the icon from the address bar into the toolbar (quick links bar for you IE users). This toolbar will rapidly fill up, and it doesn't wrap. I believe there is a Firefox extension to wrap it, but either way - it starts taking a lot of real estate. I realized that you could actually right click on the bookmarks and delete their names! So for sites with an icon, you just get a little icon up in the toolbar. I've managed to cram 8+ site links in a tiny space, and now you can too with the nullstream site!

A little background on how it's done. You simply put a Windows format .ico file in the root of your web server and name it favicon.ico. So our icon is http://www.nullstream.com/favicon.ico. You can download these icons directly via sites like Iconfactory. You can edit them with VisualStudio on Windows, among others. In order for the icon to display in the browser, I had to delete all sizes stored in the file except 16x16x16 and 16x16x256 (the third dimension is color depth).

Adding a favicon is also good because nearly all modern browsers request it each time the site is accessed for the browser session. So your server will show lots of 404 errors for favicon.ico. I figure with web caching, it's actually better for performance to have the file than not have it! Checking for the file will send the request all the way back to a disk check.

Favicon.ico was actually started by IE, which is why the icon isn't a gif, or set of gifs. In classic Microsoft form, however, IE only displays these icons sporadically in their bookmarks or toolbars, and it wasn't till Firebird that I found it useful enough to actually use.

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