This project was a collaboration with Peter van der Gulden.

The lack of a dynamic favicon (the small website icon commonly showed in browsers) following the generated random color on randomcolour.com bothered us.

A "problem" screaming to be tackled.

The biggest challenge at the time was that browsers not alway saw the favicon as a (fully valued) part of the DOM. So it wasn't just a matter of cache.

But (as quite often) the solution was blood simple. Image created on-the-fly and each time give the favicon an unique name

Versions

version 1.0 / 1.1

• code not online anymore

• Because of shifting files for different versions this is not the real v1.2 anymore :(
• Just leave it here thou. Just know in the end only the last version is what matters
• At the time it worked in Chrome but Firefox kept using "a" favicon from a cache somewhere (not in the usual cache dir). That was annoying because we did use a unique favicon name for every page load.
• later on (around May 19 2015) it also worked in newer versions of FF

• Favicon build up with PHP GD and Image Functions like imagecreatetruecolor(), imagecolorallocate() and imagefill()
• Favicon then stored in $_SESSION[]
• Favicon placed in the meta tag using data URLs with Base64 encoding like: data:image/png;base64

• same as v1.3 but...
• Only the random RGB codes stored in $_SESSION[]
• the data URL is stored in a variable

• Our code added (by Peter) to the original HTML of randomcolour.com
• A real PNG file is made and stored on the server and than it's called in the link/shortcut tag
• name of the file is [date|R|G|B].png
• On every pageload favicons older then 2 minutes wil be deleted

• same as v1.5 but...
• filenames now are [R|G|B.png]
• For the time beining old favicons are not deleted

• same as v1.6 but...
• It has got it's own site!! (from now on that would be the place of the latest version)
• no more imagedestroy() (no longer necessary)
• Now the color of the og:image also change dynamically