Simon Willison’s Weblog

fav.farm (via) Neat little site by Wes Bos: it serves SVG (or PNG for Safari) favicons of every Emoji, which can be added to any site like this:

<link rel="icon" href="https://fav.farm/🔥" />

The source code is on GitHub. It runs on Deno and Deno Deploy, and recently added per-Emoji hit counters powered by the Deno KV store, implemented in db.ts using this pattern:

export function incrementCount(emoji: string) {
  const VIEW_KEY = [`favicon`, `${emoji}`];
  return db.atomic().sum(
    VIEW_KEY, 1n
  ).commit(); // Increment KV by 1
}

# 7th October 2024, 6:46 am / deno, favicon, javascript, svg

How to Add a Favicon to Your Django Site (via) Adam Johnson did the research on the best way to handle favicons - Safari still doesn't handle SVG icons so the best solution today is a PNG served from the /favicon.ico path. This article inspired me to finally add a proper favicon to Datasette.

# 20th January 2022, 7:03 am / favicon, django, adam-johnson

Dynamically changing favicons with JavaScript. I just spotted GitHub using this trick to swap out the favicon on a pull request that hadn’t passed its tests yet for github.com/favicon-failure.ico with a little cross icon in the corner.

# 26th October 2017, 7:56 pm / favicon

Muck Rack: Links posted by Guardian Journalists on Twitter. I’m rather impressed by the Sawhorse Media collection of Twitter aggregation sites (Muck Rack aggregates journalists)—a simple idea very well executed. Here’s a nice example—this page shows links posted to Twitter by known Guardian journalists, but goes a step further and scrapes in the favicon, the real title of the page and resolves the domain from any shortened links.

# 22nd May 2009, 10:02 pm / twitter, aggregation, mashups, journalists, guardian, sawhorsemedia, muckrack, favicon

favikon.com. Small, easy to use online favicon generator.

# 13th April 2009, 12:09 pm / favikon, favicon

Google’s undocumented favicon to png convertor (via) Showing the favicon of a domain next to a link is a really nice trick, but it’s slightly tricky to achieve as IE won’t display a .ico file if you link to it from an img element, so you need to convert the images server-side. This undocumented Google API does that for you, meaning it’s much easier to add favicons as a feature to your site.

# 30th August 2008, 8:40 pm / favicon, google, undocumented, apis, png

In rainbows. Dopplr generates a unique colour for each city using an MD5 hash. The colours are then used in subtle but intelligent ways throughout the design—right down to the favicon.

# 23rd October 2007, 10:39 pm / favicon, dopplr, colour, design, md5, hashing, matt-jones, matt-biddulph