6th July 2001
Having your site stand out in a crowded bookmark list helps visitors easily identify links associated with your brilliant work of web art. You may be left wondering how some sites made that fancy icon appear next to those bookmarks. First, this only works with IE 5.0 or higher and the Linux Konqueror web browser. All that's required is an icon that measures 16 by 16 pixels and usually 16 colors. These can be made with various icon producing utilities, such as IconForge, or by using the Java applet at Favicon.com. Next, drop the file in the root directory of your website named as favicon.ico, then test it by bookmarking a page on your site. Voila! Using some HTML, you can specify custom icons for each page, and even have Windows use your custom icon in other places, such as when a shortcut to the link is placed on your dekstop. Favicon.com discusses much of this, so if you're interested in the topic, that's the place to go.