samuel.bowles.es

Here’s a script I wrote yesterday for my site. It allows you to associate favicon.ico files (those tiny little pictures that show up next to the site address in your browser) with comments. So if my friend has a favicon.ico file in place on his site and he leaves a comment on my site his little picture will show up next to his comment.

I’ve been thinking for some time about implementing a distributed version of Gravatars that relies on these favicon files rather than a central server. Yesterday I found some php classes, and wrote some code to implement it on my site. Today as I sat down to write up a description and post my code and I found the concept has not only been thought of and executed before but has a clever name “favatars”.

The idea may not be original but it’s still elegant and hopefully this script will help someone.

How It works

Each time a new visitor leaves a comment on my site with a URL the script checks to see if they have a favicon.ico if they do it creates a png version of that favicon and caches it. The script will refresh this cached version once every thirty days. If they don’t have one or they didn’t leave an address it serves up a replacement “404” icon instead.

How to Install It

1. Download the .zip, unzip it and upload it to your server.
2. Open ico2png.php and edit the $cache variable to reflect where you’d like to cache your images.
3. You may want to replace the ico.404.png file with something more interesting.

How to Use It

Wherever you’d like to have your favitar simply call the script from an <img> tag like so:

<img src="/ico2png/ico2png.php?loc=http://commenterssite.com" width="16" height="16">

Where http://commenterssite.com is the URL submitted by your commenter.

Bugs and Comments

If you have comments, bug reports, or suggestions you can submit them as replies to this post.