favicon.ico in Aleph

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Article Type: General
Product: Aleph
Product Version: 15.2

Description:
Two questions:
1) Inspecting the "error_log" for the apache web server on our current production server, I have found numerous "favicon.ico" error messages. A typical one would look like the following:
"[Tue Sep 28 00:51:58 2004] [error] [client 128.172.1.116] File does not exist: /exlibris/u18_1/alephe/apache/htdocs/favicon.ico", and the IP addresses may vary in the error messages. There are thousands of these, and because of this error the log is growing quite large. There are other missing file errors, but not to this extent. The log file is $alephe_root/apache/logs/error_log. What are these messages about and how can I eliminate them?

2) I'm trying without success to get a favicon to display in Aleph.

Resolution:
The "favicon.ico not found" that you see in your error logs is actually Internet Explorer 5 or later or another recent browser at work. The browser automatically looks for a file it thinks you should have whenever someone creates a bookmark or a shortcut to a page on your site. When you surf the internet, you've probably noticed that some of your bookmarked sites have custom icons while others have the default IE icon. Those custom icons are the favicon.ico that IE is so diligently searching for. In addition to appearing in the Favorites menu, the favicon.ico replaces the default IE icon in the Address bar at the top of the browser. When the file is not found, IE5 uses the default icon and you get an error message in your log files.

You can eliminate the error messages by putting an empty favicon.ico file in your apache root directory: $alephe_root/apache/htdocs. If your system is not set up in the standard Aleph structure, the path in the apache log should give you a clue to where to put the file. [Thanks to Janet Arth of the University of Minnesota for posting this answer on the Aleph-NA list.]

To begin using your own favicon.ico file, put favicon.ico into your apache root directory ($alephe_root/apache/htdocs) with read permission to the world. Add this line to your apache control file:
AddType image/x-icon .ico
Restart apache and the web server. This may be enough by itself.

For some users, although this eliminates the error messages in the Apache log related to favicon, it still doesn't display. If it doesn't appear as expected, look at the favicon.ico image in your browser, by pointing directly to it (e.g. http://lib.univ.edu:8991/favicon.ico). Some users see what appears to be a text-rendering of the icon, obviously not very helpful (and not expected given the httpd.conf entries).

If you see this, or even if you don't, there is another method you can use to get the favicon to display in browsers. In the meta-tags include-file (in wf), you can include the following line in the <head> section (so that it appears on each page in ALEPH):

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

It's not as elegant as just placing the icon file in the root directory, but it works.
[Thanks to > Ken Mitchell of Duke University for posting this answer on the Aleph-NA list.]

Article last edited: 10/8/2013