favicon, and Some Annoying Bot

Ah Friday. Nice!

Favicons---not so nice. Just look at how bloody complicated this mess is! For those who are somehow too lazy to click through to the Wikipedia page, allow me to quickly summarise why this is a bloody mess:

• The original de facto standard made use of a proprietary-esque Microsoft icon file format;
• The favicon was quickly co-opted for use as the default logo/emblem for the page when added to the Android screen as a bookmark;
• Apple has, of course, its own version of what it wants to do that is incompatible with the Android interpretation;
• Microsoft has their own weirdness in the form of tiles, with even more obscure dimensions that are unrelated to the published dimensions of the constructed image;
• And of course Apple needs to top it up with more nonsense with their new standard for ``pinned tabs'', which switches up from:
  1. Raster representation to vector representation; and
  2. Full colour to pure monochrome with a single colour shade

Like, seriously.

Here, check out the FAQ of a tool that attempts to handle all these. I'm not even kidding.

``MT, why do you care about favicons?''

Well, I do run my own domain, and as part of my regular maintenance checks, I was seeing evidence that favicons of all other flavours were being requested when I wasn't doing it.

That little rabbit hole revealed the depth of the insanity, and while there was a tool that allegedly could tame the whole shebang with only a small upload of the source, I didn't want to do that.

Who knows what people can/will do with the stuff that was uploaded for processing?

And so, I spent some time working on my own fixes to get my personal domain to match up as much of the requirements of the ``modern day'' favicon nonsense. In doing so, I learnt even more about ImageMagick, among which included the ability to create the proprietary ico format, and that at some point their default invocation changed from convert (which clashed with a Microsoft Windows tool that changed a disk's file system by naming convention) to magick.

Apart from ``fixing'' the favicon, I did some other tweaks. The more astute will realise that I have switched from the Inconsolata font to something new---the Intel One Mono Typeface. My main draw to this font over the old Inconsolata was on how it was designed with input from users with poor vision, the same reason why I decided to use the Atkinson Hyperlegible as my primary font in the first place.

Readability and unambiguity of the glyphs are very important to me. I hate wasting time trying to make out if something is 1Iil, or B8, or aGbgrpqu. This is doubly so for when I'm looking at code fragments. The Intel One Mono Typeface scratches this itch for the monospace font-face, and I set it up accordingly for my main domain.

I'm a little too tired to try and set it up for this [or any of the other] blogs, which may be more impactful when compared to my domain, because I use more monospace text here than there.

Yeah, I know I'm starting to sound trite. I can't help it---it's fast reaching stupid o'clock. And I've spent a better part of this week trying to recover from some non-specific and undiagnosed illness.

The last thing left to say is my observation that there is some badly written bot that has been crawling this blog for nearly a month. It's bloody irritating and annoyinng, and I hope they either fix their bot, or just to leave me alone.

So much pain.

And that's about it for now, I suppose. Bed time for me.