Fixing Favatars
Ever since this blog went online I used Favatars to make it more easy to recognize authors of comments. I think this worked out really well for my site, as many visitors have their own websites and favicons. However, despite Paul James pointing out that Cool URIs don't change, I had more and more 404s when I viewed my site. All of these resulted from favicons that weren't there anymore.
To fix this, I wrote a small PHP5 class that attempts to download the favicon from the commentators website. This class is very conservative - it stops a download if it's bigger than 50 kb, has a short timeout, only allows PNG, GIF, JPEG and ICO extensions and silently returns if there's any error. Here's how you can use it:
// Create a new Favatars object and tell it to save // all favicons to files/favatars/ $favatars = new Favatars( 'files/favatars/' ); // The get method attempts to find a favicon for the given // URL and returns the local path of the downloaded favicon, // or an empty string if none could be found. $comment['favatar'] = $favatars->get( $comment['website'] );
Read on to view the source of this class.