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What is Favicon.ico? Personalise Your Sites Bookmark(zt)(3) If your hosting company does not allow files with the .ICO extension to be uploaded, you might try to work around it by uploading it (in binary mode) with some other extension (like GIF). Once it's on your site, rename it using your FTP program to the correct extension. Helping the Browser Locate the favicon.ico fileIf you have placed your favicon.ico file in a location other than the current web directory (relative to your web page) or the root directory, you have to help your visitors' browser locate the favicon file by specifying it with a tag like the following in the <head> section of your web page. <link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />
You should replace "/favicon.ico" in the above example with the actual location of your favicon.ico file, for example, "/images/favicon.ico" if you have placed it in your "/images/" directory. This step is optional if you have put your "favicon.ico" file in the standard locations, ie, in the same directory as the web page or in the root directory of your website. Otherwise you will need to modify all your existing web pages to take advantage of the "favicon.ico" facility. How Many People are Bookmarking My Website?This "favicon.ico" used to have an interesting side-effect. The side-effect applied whether or not you bothered to put a special "favicon.ico" on your site. You used to be able to find out the number of IE 5 users who bookmarked your site by simply counting the requests for "favicon.ico" in your web server logs. From that number, you can estimate the total number of people who bookmark your site by applying this formula: number of IE 5 bookmarks divided by the fraction of your visitors using IE 5. For example, if two-thirds of your visitors use IE 5+, and you get 100 requests for the icon, simply divide 100 by two-thirds to get 150. This was by no means an accurate measure - it did not take into account numerous factors: but at least it was able to give you a hint of how useful people find your site.
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