Favicon in rss feed

Hi all,

Very small problem I am having. I have spent the last hour or so setting up RSS on my MODx site, so pleased with it, I have set up a feedburner page too. They only problem I have is that the favion that I created for my site is not showing up in my RSS reader. All the other RSS feeds I have in there (inc. other sites I have built outside of MODx) show up fine.

I think it may have something to do with the fact that we create an RSS link using a blank template, so the link to the favicon in my default template is not being picked up.

I know its a very small query, I think that a favicon adds a nice touch to an rss feeder when looking at it in a reader.

Thanks
Lee

Are you using Ditto to generate the RSS feed? Is your favicon available at yoursite.com/favicon.ico? If your reader supports proper favicons it should be detected and showed. AFAIK you can’t specify a favicon for an rss document but if you find the tag, I’ll be pleasantly surprised.

The favicon is on my site using the following in the head of the main template:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="images/favicon.ico" />

When we create an RSS feed using MODx, we have to assign a blank template to the RSS page. Therefore, if it is a blank template, there will be no favicon link as in the main template.

Does that make sense. All my other feeds I have in my reader have favicons that are generated from the sites main favicon.

Thanks
Lee

I think the favicon itself needs to be in your web document root, it can’t be in a subfolder such as images.

I made my path absolute:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://www.rebootmedia.com/favicon.ico" />

And added the favicon to my root, it still does not display in my reader. Its worth pointing out that the favicon is displaying great for every page except the xml page, suppose this would make sense because our rss pages are generated from a blank template that would not have the favicon link in there.

I have checked other sites xml pages and their favcion gets picked up from the main site:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/front_page/rss.xml
http://www.stylegala.com/feeds/news.xml

Can somebody check if there xml file picks up the favicon from their main site:

http://www.yourdomainhere.com/rss.xml

Thanks
Lee

If you look at the XML code from stylegala, you’ll see that there is no .ico specified in the feed, so your reader must be using the default "look for /favicon.ico" method.

BRIEF HISTORY OF FAVICONS: Microsoft invented them; IE would look for /favicon.ico on every website it encountered. There was a mild hoo-hah as this added lots of 404 errors in sever logs. Subsequently we got the ability to specify a location and most browsers now don’t automatically check for the .ico file. It seems your reader does do though.

Now, as there is no way of specifying it, I assume that the reader looked when you first added the feed, and doesn’t look every time (as that had been deemed Annoying by server admins).

Have you tried removing the from the feed reader and adding it again?

Yeah, I have removed it and added it about a dozen times, still no joy. As mentioned, I have a few other sites of my own that I built that have their favicon showing. I am certain that it is nothing to do with the actual XML file itself, none of the feeds I have (that show a favicon) have the link in their raw xml code. This is highlighted by the fact that my other sites favicon show fine.

The conclusion I have come to is that since we have to use a blank template in modx when adding an rss feed, that blank template does not have the favicon link.

Did anyone try their modx rss feed, i.e the link to the xml file that modx is calling. Did your favicon display in the browser, other sites I have done show fine but not with modx.

Its obviously not a big deal, its just when I am scanning down the list of subcribed news feed in my aggregator (NetNewsWire), the ones with favicons stand out, plus I’m a designer and get giddy about little things like that

Thanks
Lee

You can’t put a favicon link in an XML document. Put your favicon in the document root and it will work. I have 4 rss feeds from multiple modx sites with favicons and they all display fine in NetNewsWire.

Hi Mark,

Yeah, that was the point I was making above, I didn’t think it should go in the XML file (so I didn’t) and that it should reside in the root (which I did)

Can you provide a link to your xml file?

Thanks
Lee

Just try the MODx Blog RSS feed in NetNewsWire.