404 Error: favicon.ico

[sheila]

I've recently installed a script that e-mails me a 404 report, with the referring URL and requested file and so forth. (More details here, for those interested: http://www.aota.net/ubb/Forum3/HTML/001433-1.html )

Anyhow, I'm getting some 404 errors for the file
http://www.thinkspot.net/sheila/math/favicon.ico, which does not exist.

What's the deal with these favicon.ico files? Is this something on the end user's machine? I've never had such a file on my site, so I don't see how I could be causing it. Is there something I can do to get rid of these 404 errors?

[dank]

favicon.ico is an IE5+ addition to the favorites/bookmarks, where custom icons can be used to represent your site in place of the standard "e".[nbsp][nbsp]If someone bookmarks your site and you do not have such an icon present, it will show a 404 error in the stats.

There are lots of sources of information available, here are two off the top of my head:

http://www.aota.net/HTML/favicon.php3
http://www.favicon.com/applet.html

Dan

[bullseye]

Also, the veiwer does *not* get any error message.[nbsp][nbsp]You're the only one that knows it happened.[nbsp][nbsp]I use a similar error message reporting script and was gettng a lot of those for a while.[nbsp][nbsp]I finally broke down and created an icon just to save having to delete all the e-mail messages :-)

Bob

[Tibbits]

Look on the upside.. divide the the number of IE visitors by number of favicon 404s and you know what proportion of visitors bother bookmarking:)