I was day dreaming on the tube about a simple app build. My train of thought (no pun intended) was roughly as follows:

• I saw a poster for Jack Daniels across from me
• I remembered an old Jack Daniels advert with a collection of really small pictures in the background and a picture of jack daniels over the top. I had it as a poster when I was a student.
• I thought of the student who made the million dollar home page who did a similar thing with little website ads.
• Small ads lead to thinking about favicons
• This then lead to thinking about users submitting their favicon and it being displayed on a wall with a backlink.

So I came home and let the idea sit on my mind. I thought it might be a nice quick build and someone might find it useful. A collection of randomly submitted favicons might look pretty cool anyway. It is also a different take on a link directory.

I made a few designs before settling on the simple white design. The first two designs were quite dark and detracted away from the favicon wall. I coded the design up, added some jQuery tricks and sanitised all the inputs.

The grunt work is done by a google service which cherry picks the favicons off most sites. I made a php validation script to check that a favicon is found and if not then to request manual submission.

The favicon wall then pulls all the info from the DB and caches it for 30 secs to save on server load. The result is a stream of submitted favicons. The issue of broken images is fixed with a simple bit of JS which hides all broken images on load. I will probably build a curl script that checks the validity of the images and cleans them from the DB (this can’t be done on the fly as it will generate a noticable lag).

I made a simple RSS feed so I can update to Twitter automatically and proved a nice google link ladder.

Finally I created a simple favicon counter which is also cached for 30 secs.

Some resources I found useful when building this site:

Google Favicon Service

PHP Caching

Texture backgrounds

Creating RSS feeds