Homestar Runner Wiki Forum

I thought it might be coull to have some favicons for the forum and the wiki. I'm working on one for my webpage, and it's not working.
Just thought it would be neat.
[EDIT: Maybe we could have a poll on this.]

Does anyone care about this topic?

I think favicons would be great!

That's what I've been saying!

I use Favicons on all my sites. Well, except one. But the users of that site probably will never know the difference.

Anyway, if we know what we want, I can create them. GIMP can assemble images into an .ico file of the correct format so we can have a 16x16 for the addressbar and favorites menu, while there'd be a 32x32 for desktop shortcuts. Any pref on what the icon should be? I vote for the right hand side of:
.

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Looks like we're gonna have to shrink it!

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DO NOT ATTEMPT TO ADJUST THE JUMBOTRON, veterans, I'm really back.

Um, yes. I can shrink images. And, also, I've just realized that that image changes! I mean the one with the H*R logo, then the balooney letters with "Wiki" underneath.

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I'm skeptical. In order to get the icon to say "Homestar Runner Wiki" on three lines, each letter has to be no taller than 5 or so pixels. And it has to remain 100% legible at that. But, er, good luck.

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Now Buz, I know you are talking about this image here and not the bigger one, but I was still just about to express the same general idea as Jones here (and he beat me to it), so I figured I could go the extra step and actually see how it would look and show all yalls. Behold: (I also did it as an icon, found here.)

I could have worked a little harder and done a little transparency, but I wasn't really out to make something here. I'm just showing how small these things really are.

I beg to differ. A favicon at 16x16 does not have to be 100% legible. It has to be a picture that people recognize. If it's wording the peoples want, then "Homestar Runner Wiki" next to the icon will be a-plenty descriptive. Plus, the icon will probably show up favorably at 32x32, as a desktop icon , which is where legibility becomes an issue the way I use my desktop anyway.

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If it has text in it, the text has to be legible. If the text isn't legible then there's no point in having text in the first place.

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Fair assesment. Though a symbol (made of letters or not) says enough so that you know what a light blue "W" on your desktop is, a blue "Q" or a red "Y!" sitting there. Since it's not right to use just the "H*R" oval logo without the red "Wiki" underneath, this site doesn't really have anything else that suffices as a logo. This attempt, , is a 16x16 with only a few letters. The 32x32 could still be as above.

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Uhhh.. Good....Job. I guess.

Here's the first attempt, made of the two above images. It won't show in a browser, but you can always just download and look at it on a local machine. http://www.buzdor.com/wikipix/hrwikiicon.ico Any changes? New idears? Questions on how to use it?

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Thanks, Buz. I've been looking for (or planning to make) a good favicon for a while now. I hope you don't mind, I took the liberty of installing yours.

That's what it was there for. I kept the original XCF (GNU Image Manipulation Program format) as well as those two GIFs if you want the source.

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I like the icon alright, but it has some transparency jaggies. I'm not sure if there's anything to be done about it, but it's especially obvious if you have dark-colored tabs like me.

Also, Joey/Stu, if we want it to show up in the forum, too, we have to put it in the /forum directory as well.

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I hadn't tested it against dark backgrounds, but you were right. Try this: http://www.buzdor.com/wikipix/hrwikiicon3.ico (won't show up in browser window itself) which looks OK against light and dark except a little jaggie on the left hand side of "h" which is unavoidable if it has to be made to fit light and dark backgrounds both. Of course, I could probably start all over and do a tracing if this isn't going to be cleared up any other way.

I'm doing this the same way I'd do the emoticons we had discussed, except this has considerably more detail than most H*R faces. If my method needs to be adjusted, I'm ready to learn what someone else knows about the topic!

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Hmmm.....
On the forum you get only one Favicon.


Buy on Google, you get two:


Is ther a fix for that?

I think that's just a Firefox issue (Firefox has always had favicon issues, and has very slowly been ironing them out one by one). Report it as a bug.

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My tests on Opera and Netscape show both Favicons, however, there is a chance that the open-source icon plugin for open source GIMP built on open-source GTK+ has a bug somewhere If someone has microangelo, I can supply the source documents and they can recompile them with the industry-standard tool.

Also, there are two ways to implement a favicon: just call it favicon.ico and place it in the root, or add a <link rel="favicon" src="different.ico"> tag in the HTML head section of the document. If a site does one or the other, Firebert... I mean, Firefox may take it as different ways to present that icon. Google does not use the link tag, just the former method.

Anyway, I really noticed the jaggies on the tabs with the old icon as well. The new Icon may be OK.

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I'm thinking we can do better.

Buz, I think those jaggies are a result of using a base image that was a PNG. I've come up with a better one for you, hrlogo_baseimage02.xcf. I think you will find that much better to work with.

Agreed that we can do better. Thanks for the image!

The jaggies are an artefact of the image size reduction when combined with tranparent pixels. Since 256-color icons (Win2k and below) have no alpha transparency, a pixel is either clear or a color. When shrinking an image, the edge pixels of the shrunk image are each a result of mixing the background of the original image with the image's color at that edge. If we remove the background first, GIMP and Fireworks both try to make an alpha transparency channel. So I shrink with the background still there.

Windows XP icons have Alpha Transpaency, but there's no support in the other browsers.

So I drew over the edges manually with the color that the edge should be in http://www.buzdor.com/wikipix/hrwikiicon3.ico, which looks OK against almost all backgrounds. This issue will come up again, when we make the new emoticons! So any procedural recommendations are welcome.

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IE does even worse. You add a site to the favorites, it looks nice and stays there for a while, then once the favicon disappears from the temporary files, it doesn't come back. Do you think they'll ever fix it? No. Microsoft doesn't like to go back and fix things, they just make you buy all new software.

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I just pretend that IE doesn't support favicons, and then treat it as a pleasant surprise if I see one for a while. In all fairness, no other browser even tries to make favicons in your favorites or desktop links, do they? NN, Opera, FF, Konqueror, etc. just use them in the button bar or address bar, whereas at least IE tries to use them for favorites... the intent of a FAVicon. But you're right, they expire.

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Firefox also uses them in your bookmarks. Firefox had lots of favicon problems in the past, but looking at my bookmarks right now, I don't see any that are out of place, which is kind of surprising.

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Oh, cool.

I may uninstall NN and install FF one of these days, it depends on what my users need most. In the past it's been IE and NN.

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Who are your users?

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I'm a programmer, up 'til now many of my end-users have been in construction and education. If I ever end up with more home users than corporate users, I may be able to develop against FF. It's only in the last year that I've stopped being Netscape 4.7 compatible. NN4 doesn't always re-flow the page when HTML elements change their style's display value. My developing against IE can be a benefit: I worked out a slightly better version of an .htc component that will allow all the PNGs on this forum to have alpha transparency under IE6... but Joey didn't give me an answer when I asked if he wanted it here (but he hasn't said no, maybe trying not to hurt my feelings). He probably takes me for about 10 years younger than I am

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For some reason my favicons in Firefox like to spread to other bookmarks without favicons, usually when they're right next to each other.

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