Creating a Dynamic Favicon with Cloudinary

Ok, chalk this up to something I may never actually use in production, but I was curious how well the browser would handle changing the favicon of a tab on the fly, and combining that with Cloudinary to dynamically modify the source. The inspiration for this was something simple – Google Calendar’s favicon is unique per day, so for example, right now I see this: As there is – at most – 31 days in a month – my assumption is that they simply generated all 31 at some point and in their code serving up the web page, they select the right one. To be honest, it’s subtle and I don’t always notice it, but it’s a nice effect. I decided to take a look... more →
Posted in: JavaScript

Using Your Favicon for Monitoring Long Processes

A week or so ago, I was doing some tests on Google Colab and noticed something interesting. The notebook I was using was one that took one to two minutes to process. Before I’d start the process, the favicon looked like so: After kicking off the workflow, the favicon changed like so: To be honest, I had not noticed it earlier, but I only fairly recently started using a somewhat ‘slow’ notebook so it’s possible I just didn’t need it before. Realizing how it’s being used now, I thought it was an excellent user experience feature and looked into how to use it in my own applications. Changing the Favicon Ok, so this part is stupid easy. Assuming you’ve... more →
Posted in: JavaScript