SDMB avatar?

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1

I just noticed that my Firefox bookmark for the SDMB has a avatar, but I’m too blind to tell what it is?

Identification please?

2

Hm. Kinda looks like a toilet plunger to me. “Plumbing the depths of knowledge since 1973”?

3

I’m not getting one at all, just the default “little blue ball” that represents sites without favicons. (You are referring to favicons, yes?)

4

Yes, he probably is, and he’s probably getting one from another site. Firefox has a long-standing bug that bookmarks for sites without favicons often display the favicon for some other random site, both on the personal toolbar and in the bookmarks menu. Right now, my SDMB link is displaying the google favicon, unaboard is displaying the CNN favicon, and SD itself is displaying the favicon for my own site.

And my “no favicon” icon (when it displays it) is a “blank document” page, not a “little blue ball” - probably controlled by some theme setting or another.

Another possiblity is that he’s found some alternate way of addressing SDMB that causes it to see the favicon.ico installed by VB:

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/favicon.ico

If you link to the boards as in that URL, you won’t see it because they didn’t install VB at the boards.straightdope.com document root.

5

Oh, excuse me, parsnip appears to be a she.

6

This is very likely to be what is going on. I myself have the same issue; the SD main page has Gmail’s little envelope, for example.

7

Thanks for telling me it’s a favicon. Still can’t see it well enough to figure out what it means.

8

Well, if what fluiddruid and I suspect is true, you are seeing one from some other site, and other people won’t be seeing the same thing. Think about where you’ve been visiting or look at your other bookmarks, and you may be able to find the site it actually belongs to. That might provide a clue as to what it is supposed to be.

(BTW, firefox apparently stores the icon as an encoded binary in the bookmarks.html file - there’s an “ICON” attribute on the link corresponding to your bookmark, set to a base64 encoding. I imagine one could ignore the “do not edit” notation at the top of this file and remove the icon, or plug in another one if you could encode it suitably. One thing I actually like about firefox is that it keeps things like bookmarks and cookies in accessible text files.)