Maybe everyone already knew about these, but I just stumbled on them a few weeks ago and found some more yesterday. You can have animated favicons in Firefox – tabs are animated and when you bookmark them, the bookmark icon is animated too. A quick peek at the HTML of a page with animated favicons shows they simply have a 16×16 animated gif and point the page to that as their favicon with this:

( NOTE: <> changed to [] so this would show up)
[link href="images/favico.gif" TYPE="image/gif" REL="icon"]

I have also read that you can just rename your 16×16 animated gif as favicion.ico but that just seems wrong. I just tried that and it does indeed work though. I just took this animated gif and renamed it to favicon.ico and it works. Visit this page to see it in action. The nice thing about doing it this way is that you don’t have to go change all of your pages. It didn’t show up for me in IE though.

A quick and easy way to see how an image would look as a favicon is to simply view the image in Firefox. When you view an image in Firefox, it shows it as a favicon in the tab and in the address bar. This makes it easy to scour the web for a good animated gif as a favicon. Simply find an image and “view image” in Firefox to see how it would look.

On this page, I changed the HTML so that it points to this animated gif as its favicon and that too worked.

Here is a good page to grab some animated gifs to play around with. Choose your style and put a letter in the edit field and hit submit then right click on the animated letter and save the image. That’s where I got both of the example images for my own tests.

Here are a bunch of example websites that have animated favicons. View them in Firefox to see them.

• http://pipa.ws
• http://www.pod1.com/
• http://www.cleverwasteoftime.com/
• http://www.stonewall.co.za (animates periodically)
• http://graphiste.crea.free.fr/
• http://www.couleur3.ch/
• http://schestowitz.com/
• http://bugmenot.com (animates periodically)

Normally I try to steer clear from posting about topics that are covered on other big websites like Slashdot and BoingBoing, etc., so I can keep this blog filled with original reading material, but this one is worth mentioning. It’s a video of plants that have been digitally modified to look like they have things like tentacles, eyes, and mouths. Really weird – it doesn’t make me sick like the BoingBoing post says, but it is definitely creepy – to me it looks like plants might look like on an alien world (or in a scifi movie).

Alien Plant Movie [via BoingBoing]

geek, aliens, plants, scifi, video, weird, creepy

Here is an online quiz from the BBC that tests your geekiness. Of course, if you are reading this blog you should get at LEAST 9/10 of them right. I didn’t know one of the questions about “grinding, kiting and pulling”, but it was an easy guess. Get your parents to take the test and see how well they do – that should be entertaining.

BBC Geek Quiz

geek, quiz, test, BBC

My mom has posted a comment on a blog. I don’t think she has ever even read a blog, let alone posted a comment on one. I am marking this down on my calendar.

geek, blogs, funny

Well, here is the reason I have been slack about posting here lately: Candy Addict. A new project of mine – like I need more projects. It’s a ton of fun though. Drop by the site and let me know what you think…either here or there.

geek, candy, food, sweets