Category: All

All posts across the whole website belong to this category. They might also belong to some other categories as well, but this one holds all of them. Hence the descriptive name – All.

Linking to favicons

Favicons have been around for a few years now.  But they were mostly used by the browsers – in multi-tab environments and in bookmark managers.  Recently I’ve noticed the trend to use favicons in web design – next to external links or near the blog comment’s author, etc.

Adding a favicon to the design is a simple thing for the designer.  But a totally different story for the web developer.  Favicons can be either dropped into the root folder of the site or linked to from the page’s HTML.  On top of that, the times of the single favicon.ico format are long gone too.  These days you could get a GIF or PNG image.

So, how would reliably finda favicon of a site?  It turns out, you don’t really have to work too hard, since someone has already solved your problem.  From comments to this article (in Russian) I’ve learned of the Google web service.  So, all you’ll need to do is this (with whatever domain name that you need):

<img src="http://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=mamchenkov.net">

Works and sound good, right?  Wrong!  As I mentioned already, there is a way to link to favicons from HTML.  And this service doesn’t seem to take that into account.  Well, not to worry anyway.  There is another one that does – getFavicon.  This one works in a very similar way, but supports the full URL as a parameter.  For example:

<img src="http://g.etfv.co/https://mamchenkov.net/wordpress/">

On top of that, you can include properly encoded GET parameters, and avoid browser’s per-server connection limit, by using multiple sub-domains.  Brilliant, I say.

Digg.com sold to Betaworks

Catching up with Slashdot today, I read about Digg.com being sold to Betaworks:

The once popular social news website Digg.com, which received $45 million in funding, is being sold to to Betaworks for $500,000. From the article: ‘Betaworks is acquiring the Digg brand, website, and technology, but not its employees. Digg will be folded into News.me, Betaworks’ social news aggregator. This is not the outcome people expected for Digg. In 2008, Google was reportedly set to buy it for $200 million.

This brings back a lot of memories.  Back when Digg.com started, it became a “big thing” almost instantly.  There was plenty of hype around it, and many people went as far as predicting the death of Slashdot.  Digg was supposed to be some sort of new and better Slashdot.  But when I tried using Digg.com, I immediately thought that that was not the case.

The two sites are very different.   One of the most obvious difference is that Slashdot is more focused on the technology, and Digg covers pretty much everything and anything.   But that wasn’t the most important difference for me.  The most important for me was that Slashdot seems to be focused around discussions and commentary, while Digg.com was just a delivery system for the news articles.  And even back then there were numerous resources where you could find news.  Finding the news hasn’t been the problem for years.  But finding good commentary and discussions has always been.  And still is.

Slashdot comments were and still are its greatest value.  Digg had discussions as well, but somehow they weren’t as valuable.  And if I think about it for a second, for me personally, the greatest value of Digg was not the actual site Digg.com, but the Diggnation show.  Which, once again, provided commentary and discussions of the top stories from Digg.com.  Too bad that is discontinued now as well.

Note to employers, both current and future: if I a…

Note to employers, both current and future: if I am looking forward to Friday, then there is something wrong with the work environment.  And if you ask me what it is, I might not even know the answer.  But you should ask me anyway.