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External Site Link Favorite Icons Using MooTools and CSS

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I recently came upon an interesting jQuery article about how you can retrieve all external links within a page, build the address of the site's favorite icon, and place the favorite icon along side the link. I've chosen a different approach which uses CSS to position the favorite icon as a background image.

View Demo

The CSS

.favicon	{ background-repeat:no-repeat; padding:2px 0 3px 22px; }

This CSS code will provide padding and background image placement for the link.

The MooTools JavaScript

/* when the dom is ready... */
window.addEvent('domready',function() {
	/* grab all complete linked anchors */
	$$('a[href^="http://"]').each(function(a) {
		/* if it's not on the davidwalsh.name domain */
		if(!a.get('href').contains(window.location.host)) {
			/* get the favicon */
			var favicon = a.get('href').replace(/^(http:\/\/[^\/]+).*$/, '$1') + '/favicon.ico';
			/* place it in the anchor */
			a.setStyle('background-image','url(' + favicon + ')').addClass('favicon');
		}
	});
});

I've chosen to include the favorite icon as a background image as opposed to the jQuery article's method of injecting an image.

View Demo

Would you use this method on your website?

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Discussion

  1. NICEOUTPUT

    This is great, simple and effective, thanks David.

  2. Sebastian Markbåge

    You can also use the new MooTools More URI syntax which also works with base-tags.

    window.addEvent('domready',function(){
    var baseHost = URI.base.get('host');
    $$('a[href^="http://"]').each(function(a){
        var uri = new URI(a);
        if(baseHost != uri.get('host')){
            var favicon = new URI('/favicon.ico', { base: uri });
            a.setStyle('background-image','url(' + favicon + ')').addClass('favicon');
        }
    });
});
  3. Jan

    Grat one, even better idea!!! I created something similar adding icon to for all external links using URI subclass http://mootools.net/docs/more/Native/URI

     window.addEvent('domready',function() {
        var host = window.location.host;
        var links = $$('a');
        links.each(function(elem,i){ 
            var myURI = new URI(elem.get('href'));
            var hostExtern = myURI.get('host');
                if(hostExtern!=host) {
                  elem.addClass('web');
                }
         })
})
  4. Sebastian Markbåge

    Actually, since you’re not using the link URI for anything else you don’t have to create another object.

    Just use uri.set('value', '/favicon.ico'); Set value will take relative paths.

  5. Crispijn

    Nice one David! Simple but very effective!

  6. dirkf

    Cool idea !

    As not all website are having a favicon, I added some stuff to check if the favicon is properly loaded.
    If not, the background-image should not be changed, and remains the default image I use to indicate external links.

    My inner code block looks like this:

    var favicon = href.replace(/^(http:\/\/[^\/]+).*$/, '$1') + '/favicon.ico',
     img = new Image();

img.onload = function(){
    a.setStyle('background-image','url(' + favicon + ')');
}
img.src = favicon; //load it now.
  7. Tim

    Nice idea, this could be usefull for my next linklist ^^

  8. Facundo

    Complete offtopic: Can you move the site search box to a more prominent place? It took me some time to find it….

  9. Blogging Tips

    Here is a simple step by step tutorials to create your own FAVICON easily on
    photoshop cs version.
    How to create FAVICON using Photoshop?

  10. karev

    really usefull but how can i disable this feature for linked images ???????

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!