Saturday, November 04, 2006

General Web Tips

Favicon

You might have noticed that when you visit some web sites, there will be a small image that appears at the top of your browser... as well as in the URL addressbar (if u use firefox). Wanna know how to do it? It is very simple:

1. Open paintbrush
2. Create an image of size 24x24 pixels
3. Save it as "favicon.ico"
4. Upload the favicon.ico image to your website root directory. The root directory is the main folder where all your files reside at, like your main index page.

Thats it.

IE behaves differently. It will not showup the icon in the address bar like Mozilla Firefox when you just visit a page. But it will only work, if you have bookmarked that web page. So in IE:

1. bookmark your page
2. then visit that page

Also make sure u have the following line in the :
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon">
<link rel="icon" href="favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon">

Mozilla Firefox works without the above two lines also.

I tested it and it works fine in Mozilla as well as in IE 6. For more info refer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favicon and http://www.chami.com/HTML-kit/services/favicon/help/

Apache log - more detailed entries

You want to add a little more detail to your access log entries?

Use the --combined-- log format rather than --common-- log format:

CustomLog logs/access_log combined

The --combined-- log format offers two additional pieces of information not included in the --common-- log format:
1. the Referer (where the clinet linked from) and
2. the User-agent (what browser they are using)

Source: Apache Cookbook

Web protocols - Fundamentals

Good article on Web protocols by Ryan Tomayko - "How I Explained REST to My Wife":

http://naeblis.cx/articles/2004/12/12/rest-to-my-wife

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