OK, I’m going to geek out a little on this one but bear with me, cause its been buggin me…

The Greenwich Time, Stamford Advocate, and Norwalk Advocate family of newspaper websites all still display the default Sun web server favicon.ico icon that came with their web servers.

What does this mean?

Well, look at the picture - the favicon.ico is the little picture that appears next to your url in a web browser. When you use a web server made by Sun Microsystems, it will have that default purple icon representing the Sun logo as default - you either have to remove it or replace it, which is usually one of the first things a webmaster will do. This is especially true on a commercial website, because showing the default logo kind of symbolizes that either your webmaster doesn’t know what hes doing or just doesn’t care.

Whats even more embarrassing is that this is an OLD Sun favicon.ico - they have since replaced it with a new one which reads ‘Sun’.

This was a great idea, because now when a webmaster sees that logo, he knows hes got to get it off of there.

I attended a web conference last week where there was much talk of ‘hippos’ in commercial web development. That is, in non-web companies, the person with the highest pay usually makes all the decisions, at the expense of informed decisions. I can imagine that there is a possibility that during an early web design meeting, some hippo at the Stamford Advocate said ‘lets keep it that way - I like purple!’.

Oh, and while they are at it, Stamford Advocate needs to fix their RSS feed and links - half the time I click on a link for the Stamford Advocate, I get a 404.