Thursday, 30th June, 2005

Favicon Geekery

Yes, I know everyone hates it when I go off on a geeky-adventure, and no-one really cares about the ins and outs of what makes this weblog tick, but, well

In my never-ending quest to tweak things beyond their obvious limmitations, I thought it would be a rather nice thing if I was to tidy up my Blogroll. It was a bit ugly before, and, well, I don't like ugly things...

So, a cunning plan: Every hour or so, pull the favicon.ico file from each of the sites in my blogroll, and then display them next to the name of the weblog Gorgeous...

Except MSIE doesn't like .ico files It's possible that I've misunderstood something here, or perhaps my mime types are askew, but never mind, I'll just use the gd library to convert the .icos into .pngs.

But of course, there isn't a createimagefromico() function in PHP is there? I was about to give up, when I stumbled on a rather wonderful function to make and read .ico files

Suddenly, everything is OK The only thing I had to change, was replacing a die(); with a return; — so that I could allow for different types of .icos (like some are 32x32 pixels, some are 16 bit, some are 8 bit, you know)

Now what happens, is that once an hour, Erin checks my del.icio.us links to see which I've tagged as "blog", then she pulls the favicon.ico file from the weblogs, and caches it into a folder with an md5 hash filename. Then she checks to see if a png exists for the site, and if not, creates one

I should probably only pull the favicon from the site if I don't already have a copy, but I'm a lazy coder, really

...

Oh, and cheers everyone for spotting that I finally got the CSS right so that MSIE centres the page.

Lauren, you were right. It was all the DOCTYPE's fault

will you be adding a spell-checker then?

Ha! Actually, I've been thinking about it for a while...

Can you put a spelchecker in your coments field two?

Sure, I think I can — I won't even charge you. I'll do it four three.

(God, that was awful )

Crap — I thought that was all working properly now... Ack, I'll go back to it later

Spell-Checking

OMG, that was a lot easier than I thought it would be

For the curious, I'm using aspell

Sure Jane To quote Wikipedia...

A favicon (short for "Favorites icon"), also known as a page icon, is an icon associated with a particular website or webpage. A web designer can create such an icon, and many graphical web browsers — such as recent versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, Safari, and Konqueror — can then make use of them. Browsers that support favicons may display them in the browser's URL bar, next to the site's name in lists of bookmarks, and next to the page's title in a tabbed document interface.

It is, as Becky pointed out, very hard to scale an image down to 16x16 pixels and retain any of the original context. My little one — — took me ages to refine.

My one gripe with it, currently, is that for the life of me, I couldn't get transparency working properly on it. I'd much rather it didn't have the white box around it. I gather you can use any type of image you like for a favicon...

any appropriately sized (16x16 pixels or larger) image can be used, and although many still use the .ico format, others use GIF or PNG files.

...but in practice, it didn't work too well for me.

Phallic Symbolism

Prompted by Joanna's latest moderating dilemma, in particular seeing if the anchored link to me works or not, I just had a quick re-peek at the Venn diagram I drew last night.

Initially, I'd been able to picture it as Mel said:

looks like the head of a giant fly...

But on closer inspection ... OMG — the subset of transvestites who don't live in Lancaster are being penetrated by a dodgily-drawn cock belonging to a man called Jeff

I'm reading too much into it, aren't I?

(I know, I've got it set on stoopid US-English at the moment. I promise I'll fix that. Daft Yanks — can't even spell "colour"...)

Looking like a Bloke

I've been having a rather interesting email conversation with some recently — nothing ground-breaking — just some interesting observations of the pros and cons of looking like a girl.

The thing is, I often assert that I'm under no delusions that I do look like a woman, but actually, if I'm true to myself, then I am

And the reason I use the word "delusion" is because having seen a lot of the pictures that people have taken of me over the past weekend, I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that the cheeky little minx that looks back at me from the mirror, bears no physical resemblance to the stocky bloke that everyone else sees.

An example for you:

OK, so I'm walking to the Manhattan Bar to get ready for the fashion show on Saturday afternoon yeah? And I'm pretty convinced that what's going on on Princess Street is that a young, confident, passable trannie is swanning her way up the pavement...

Oh. My. God.

(This is no comment on Sally's photography BTW — this is just about me OK?)

I'm not entirely sure what I'm trying to say here. I think it's something along the lines of this:

I've been trying, for the past four years, to accept the way that I look. Part of that has been about trying to find a way of looking as much like a woman in photographs as is humanly possible. And to some extents, I think I have. I know that the rose-tinted version of myself that I see in the mirror isn't shared by everyone — but, I dunno, I'm better at it than I used to be. Yeah?

Another part of it though, is trying to come to terms to the idea that I will always look like a bloke in a dress.

I'm better at it than I used to be. Previously, I couldn't even look in the mirror when I was in the half-way stage. I used to have to go the whole hog — make-up and everything — just to be able to comfortably look in a mirror at myself in a frock.

But now, I can have a full beard and not give a shit.

Having said that though, it's still gutting to see images of myself on the web where I blatantly don't look like my egotistic self-projected fantasy.

This isn't just a trannie thing BTW — it applies to photographs of boy-me too. As I tried to explain in an email earlier:

A lot of what I was saying about photographs not being the same as my perception of myself applies as much to "Graham" as it does "Siobhan" — I'm forever seeing pictures of me that friends have taken, and baulking at what I look like. It's only rarely that one comes out where I look the way I want to look.

A wee while ago, I took some pictures of myself as a boy to stick on my Flickr photostream — to freak everybody out What I found interesting was that I went through exactly the same process as I do with pictures of Siobhan — taking hundreds and maybe only using one.

I dunno what I'm really trying to say here. Maybe I'm just being vain. Maybe I'm just being aggressively self-editing.

Maybe I've just got to accept that sometimes, despite my best efforts, I don't look like a girl. And maybe I've got to try and settle, in my own head, why exactly I try and look like a girl in the first place.

You will have to excuse my impatience here, but I'm dying to see the pictures that April took of me in Evolution.

And on being the Poster-girl for the fashion show? I look like my old boss. And that scares me.

Quick and Tasty Snack

Seen the current advert for Lee & Perrins? Guy, in a supermarket, waltzing down the aisles wanting a "quick and tasty snakc"?

(yeah, I Know — so much for my spell-checker — it doesn't work if I'm doing this from the command-line OK?)

But then, then he sees a bottle of Worcestershire sauce, and lo and behold, he's rewarded with stunning cheese on toast.

Quick and tasty my arse

Tasty, yes, but quick?!

As someone whose diet consists pretty much soley of cheese-on-toast, can I point out that it takes ages for the grill to even warm up. And then you've got the soul-numbingly tedious task of browning just one side of the bread.

Quick indeed. *pfft*

A "quick" snack is buying a packet of Cheesey Wotsits on your way past the cigarette counter as you leave the supermarket.

...

Incidently, it just dawned on me, whilst writing this, that the last time I ate anything was yesterday lunchtime. I'm going to make cheese on toast (with paprika on it, probably).

And people wonder how I stay skinny...

Marginally quicker than Super Noodles anyway...

Do people still eat that?

An email

Sorry, just wanted to share this email that Simon just sent me — a tad freaky if you ask me...

...premonition or inspiration ?