Web aggregators and favicons
June 16th, 2005 by 
Phil
One of the nicest things about Bloglines is that it uses site favicons to display the list of feeds in the left-hand frame. Very nice it looks too.
There are three free self-hostable web aggregators that I know of: FeedOnFeeds, Lilina and Gregarious. All of them try and retrieve a site’s favicon by finding the URL of the website the feed describes and pegging /favicon.ico onto the end of it.
Whilst this is a reasonable attempt, it’s not great, and will only give about two-thirds of the favicons you need.
If you don’t find a favicon at FeedUrlReference/favicon.ico you should also:
- check to see if a favicon exists in the base directory of the site you’re looking at (e.g. if FeedUrlReference points at www.example.com/myweblog/ and there isn’t a www.example.com/myweblog/favicon.ico then you should also check www.example.com/favicon.ico)
- run a couple of regexes on the FeedUrlReference to see if it uses the
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="UrlToFavicon">syntax (or the less popular<link rel="icon" href="UrlToFavicon">which also gets used)
Is this too much work just to get a nice image in your aggregator? I don’t think so, which is why my hacked copy of FeedOnFeeds now does it (with proper caching, too, as opposed to at the weekend, when it ran wild – sorry about that)
