The pesky Plesk favicon from hell won't leave me alone.

February 23, 2009 10:34 AM

The pesky Plesk favicon from hell won't leave me alone. If you're using vista and IE, can you spare a moment?

I've recently started working on this website. If you're using vista and IE, can you take a peek and tell me what the favicon (tiny picture next to the URL in the address bar) looks like?

The organization that hired me originally bought the website from someone thats hosting it on a resellers account, and has installed plesk cp. When I first got control of the site, it was using a default drupal favicon. I've overwritten all the favicon.ico's I can find. I've even changed the head in the template to point to an absolute file path. Drupal dude icon is gone, but now it's been replaced by the red plesk sunburst favixon in Visa with IE7.

XP with IE7, firefox, safari, and ubuntu browser all show the correct blue star favicon. Of course my boss is using Vista and IE7, and I need to keep her happy. I understand that Vista stores favicons in a low integrity cache which leads to much headaches. Is there some trick to getting around this?

(and yes it's a properly encoded ico)

Thanks.

posted by fontophilic to computers & internet (9 comments total)

I see a blue star. It might be an icon caching issue in Windows; I think that if you download TweakUI, there's an option to repair the icon cache.
posted by helios at 10:39 AM on February 23, 2009

Vista/IE shows a blue star, same as in Firefox.
posted by dunkadunc at 10:43 AM on February 23, 2009

The icon cache that TweakUI repairs is not the same cache that IE uses, so it will not help.

I see the blue star in IE7. If you're not seeing it, the best thing to do is try clearing history and Temporary Internet Files for the computer that is having issues.

See also this post I wrote on dealing with Favicon issues.
posted by jeffamaphone at 11:05 AM on February 23, 2009

Blue star. (oh that's what "favicon" means).
posted by Zambrano at 11:10 AM on February 23, 2009

Try a hard refresh: Ctrl + Shift + Refresh or F5; that should flush the cached icon out.
posted by disillusioned at 11:16 AM on February 23, 2009

I get the blue star in IE7.
posted by jenkinsEar at 11:17 AM on February 23, 2009

FWIW, it looks like your apache is set to serve it up as text/plain, so it's possible that vista is choking on that when it goes to replace the previous plesk one:

Here's the headers:

http://www.poweracrosstexas.org/favicon.ico

GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1
Host: www.poweracrosstexas.org
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009011913 Firefox/3.0.6
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive

HTTP/1.x 200 OK
Date: Mon, 23 Feb 2009 19:18:19 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.2 (Fedora)
Last-Modified: Thu, 05 Feb 2009 18:11:50 GMT
Etag: "d40b34-57e-d6964580"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 1406
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/plain

Fixing this should be as simple as mapping .ico to image/x-icon in your mime.types file.
posted by jenkinsEar at 11:21 AM on February 23, 2009

Blue star. Vista, IE 8.
posted by fixedgear at 3:45 PM on February 23, 2009

Thanks for the replies and help. Next time I can get a hold of my boss's laptop I'm gonna try a hard refresh.

jenkinsEar, thanks for finding that. Unfortunately the guys that are reselling/hosting the domain haven't given me access to tomcat or the conf directory. *uuugh* (or even webalizer! they really don't trust me.)

jeffamaphone, thanks for your blog post. I'm a visual designer first, web second. Having the process explained like that is very helpful.
posted by fontophilic at 4:36 PM on February 23, 2009