Don't hurt my files!

I have been using IntelliJ IDEA since I started working on JIRA at Atlassian. I finally upgraded to IDEA 6.0.2 last week. The first impressions are good.

I was re-arranging the dependencies of projects and libraries and needed to remove one. What made me feel really good was this pop-up:

I am so happy with IDEA's pacifist approach to my files. I am against the violence on the files!

What I did not know about favicon

Long time ago I learnt about that little file that can make your website special. I'm talking about favicon or favorites icon. This icon file is used when a page is bookmarked in IE5+ and Firefox.

I knew that this file had to be located in the root of the web server. And that was good enough for me at that time. Until today I did not know that the location of favicon.ico file did not have to be the root directory only.

Favicon can be associated with a webpage, not only a website. That means two things:

• favicon placed in the root directory of the webserver is used with all web pages, no coding is necessary;
• favicon can be placed anywhere on the webserver and must be referenced from the page in order to be used, favicon is then referred to as page icon.

All you need to do to customize the page icon is to put the following line into the header section of your page:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/images/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon">

where the value in href points to the location of the favicon you want to associate with this page.

Few facts about favicon:

• ICO file can contain multiple resolutions (the most commonly used being 16×16 and 32×32, with 64×64 and 128×128 sometimes used by Mac) and bit-depths (most common being 4, 8, 24 bpp—i.e. 16, 256 and 16 million colors) in the file;
• image can be also any image format supported by web browser; e.g. GIF, PNG;
• favicon.com is a website dedicated to favicon, it also includes an online editor.

So the good news is that literally every page on your website can have its own icon (which would be a nonsense, but makes a total sense for web applications running on the same server).

Animated CSS Evolution

I found this quite impressive animated GIF that show an evolution of a CSS for a website. The original post with animation was created by Dion Almaer.

Well done!