Copyright: FormWhiz Version 1.0  Copyright © 2000, Ziff Davis Media, Inc.


Commands

File

Favorite (these commands are also available from the right-click context menu of any shortcut)

Tools

Tree

Overview

Using FavOrg

Support


Contents

Overview

Using FavOrg

Working online

Working offline

Commands

File

Favorite (these commands are also available from the right-click context menu of any shortcut)

Tools

Tree

Support


Delete by status

This dialog box allows you to specify which shortcuts should be sent to the Recycle Bin. You can select among 4 possible states : site not found, page not found, timeout and access denied. As you check the corresponding status, the dialog automatically computes the number of shortcuts that will be involved in the deletion process. Click OK to send the selected shortcuts to the Recycle Bin.

Overview

Using FavOrg

Commands

Support


Favorites menu
Favorite menu

Pick icon

Mark the icon of the currently selected shortcut as the "picked icon". This icon is then displayed in the main window status bar. It can then be assigned to any other selection of shortcuts.

Assign picked icon

Assign the picked icon to the current selection (single item, selection or folder).

Assign custom icon

Assign a user-defined icon to the current selection (single item, selection or folder). The icon can be retrieved from any .ico, .exe or .dll file.

Edit URL

Edit the URL of the currently selected (or right-clicked) shortcut.

Set / view status

Force or read the status of the selected shortcut(s). The current status of the selected item(s) is checked in the popup menu. For a selection, this happens only if all the selected shortcuts have the same status.

Display info

Display the Web server information collected for that link during the online checking process.

Send to Recycle Bin

Send the selected shortcut(s) or folder(s) to the Recycle Bin. If you are using a network shared favorites folder, the deletion is permanent.

Overview

Using FavOrg

Commands

File

Tools

Tree

Support


File menu

Generate report

Generates a report file containing all the information recorded for each Internet shortcut (server information, status and icon information) during the online checking process.

View report

Loads the selected report file into Notepad.

Overview

Using FavOrg

Commands

Favorite

Tools

Tree

Support


Options

Timeout

While working online, FavOrg will (usually) not wait a response from the server longer than the time specified here (in seconds). This setting is not very accurate but using lower values generally accelerate the checking process (but gives more chances to get a timeout status for links pointing to slow servers).

Do not check connection

If enabled, this option will prevent FavOrg from verifying the Internet connection before starting to work online. Check this option if you have a permanent Internet connection or if you are connected through a network gateway.

Change favicons folder

This allows you to specify where FavOrg should store the downloaded favicons. The default is \FavOrg\Data.

Overview

Using FavOrg

Commands

Support


Overview

FavOrg is about favicons. Favicons appeared with Internet Explorer 5.0. Whenever you connect to a Web site that proposes a favicon, Internet Explorer will download that icon to your system and will use it for any shortcut or menu item created for this web link. This is a useful feature because this will make finding a particular site in your Favorites folder easier, especially if you have many favorites.

What is a favicon by the way? Internet Explorer will always look for a file named favicon.ico in the root folder of any site to which you connect. For example, if you connect to http://www.thissite.com/programs/freeware/index.htm, the favicon URL should be http://www.thissite.com/favicon.ico. If IE finds such a file, it will download it as soon as you create a new item for this site in your favorites folder (Add to favorites... command). This icon will be assigned to the corresponding shortcut automatically. You’ll see that a favicon is sometimes not an actual icon but a bitmap (which sometimes leads to minor display problems).

So, why do we need a utility to manage these favicons? Because Internet Explorer doesn’t do its job very well. The downloaded icon file is stored as a temporary file. Which means that after a while, the favicon will disappear and your shortcut will be associated again with the standard Internet Explorer icon. This often happens after cleaning up your Temporary Internet Files folder. FavOrg will fix this problem and ensure that your favicons are made sticky. That is, once downloaded, the icon will be assigned to the shortcut permanently. FavOrg stores the favicons in a user-defined folder.

Also, for unknown reasons, Internet Explorer sometimes fails to automatically download the favicon. FavOrg will check any Internet shortcut in your favorites folder and will automatically download and install the favicon if it is present on that particular Web site.

FavOrg will also allows you to assign a custom icon to any of your Internet favorites, even if there’s no favicon downloadable from the corresponding Web site.

Finally, since FavOrg must check the validity of an Internet shortcut before trying to download the corresponding favicon (if any), this is a good opportunity to find which of your favorites links are broken. FavOrg will report dead sites, removed or moved pages and will also be able to automatically reset a link to the site’s root page (if a page has been removed) or to update a link to a page that has been relocated.

FavOrg is not a replacement for the Organize favorites dialog box. It is just here to manage the favicons and the custom icons assigned to a given Internet shortcut and to give you information about dead links (which you may decide to delete).

NB: In the following, favorite, Internet shortcut, shortcut, link and Web link have the same meaning.

FavOrg works with any 32-bit version of Windows provided Internet Explorer 4.0 or above is installed. Although the idea of favicon is not officially supported by Internet Explorer 4.0, FavOrg will be able to download any favicon and will assign it to the corresponding Internet shortcut even if you are using this version of IE. This change will be reflected in the favorites bar of Internet Explorer. The only minor problem with IE 4.0 is that it is unable to automatically refresh the favorites bar when an icon is changed. You must close IE 4.0 and re-open it after assigning icons from FavOrg.

Using FavOrg

Commands

Support


Support

Help for this program and for PC Magazine's free utilities can be obtained in our online discussion area on the World Wide Web : http://www.pcmag.com/utilities/support.html.

Overview

Using FavOrg

Commands


Tools menu

Show legend

Display a floating window explaining the meaning of the status icons.

Delete by status

Open the Delete by status dialog box.

Options

Open the Options dialog box

Overview

Using FavOrg

Commands

File

Favorite

Tree

Support


Tree menu

Expand all

Fully expand the whole Favorites tree.

Collapse all

Collapse the Favorites tree up to the first level under the root.

Expand current

Expand the selected folder.

Collapse current

Collapse the selected folder

Select none

Clear the current selection.

Overview

Using FavOrg

Commands

File

Favorite

Tools

Support


Using FavOrg

When the program is launched, it automatically loads your favorites folder (this may last a few minutes if you have many favorites) and displays it as a tree in its main window (the main window can be resized to accommodate big favorite trees). Once the tree is loaded, FavOrg is ready to work. Each Internet shortcut in the tree is displayed along with two icons on its left. The leftmost icon is the status icon. It indicates the status of the link (see online tasks). The second icon is the favicon or custom icon assigned to the shortcut, if any. If no icon is assigned to a shortcut, that shortcut gets the default Internet Explorer icon (which is what happened to most of your favorites before FavOrg appeared). Double-clicking any shortcut will cause Internet Explorer to navigate to that link.

FavOrg is a very simple program that is almost self-explanatory. There are two kinds of tasks that you can achieve with FavOrg: online tasks and offline tasks.

Overview

Commands

Support


Working offline

Once FavOrg has finished processing the shortcuts that you selected, there are a lot of things that you can do. You can trigger specific tasks against a single shortcut, multiple shortcuts or subfolders of the favorites folder. Just select the item(s) that you want to act upon and use the Favorite menu (or click the target item with the right mouse button). Commands that are not relevant will be disabled. You can select multiple items with the mouse (Ctrl+click or Shift+click) or with the keyboard (as you do in Windows Explorer). Remember however that multiple selection is allowed only for sibling items (items at the same level in the tree). If you right click within a selection, the command will apply to the whole selection. If you select a folder or multiple folders, the action will apply to all Internet shortcuts stored in these folders and their subfolders. The following gives you an overview of the available commands:

1/ While checking a link, FavOrg collects information about the Web site pointed to by this link. You can see that information by using the Display info... command. That information is also saved over sessions. You can also generate a report file by using the File | Generate report... command. File | View report... will load the report file into Notepad. Generating reports is useful if you created a great number of favorites. The generated report file contains a lot of information about the target Web servers and can be used to produce interesting statistics about these servers.

2/ FavOrg allows you to assign any icon to a given Internet shortcut. You can either assign the icon already assigned to another shortcut or any other custom icon. To assign an icon already used by another shortcut, just select that shortcut and select the Pick icon... command. The picked icon will appear in the status bar of the FavOrg main window. Then, you can select the target item(s) and use the Assign picked icon... command to assign the picked icon to the selected shortcut(s) or folder(s). Or you can use the Assign custom icon... command to assign any other icon that may be available on your system (you can select a .ICO file or a .EXE or a .DLL file containing icons).

3/ Once you have assigned an icon to a shortcut, IE and Windows won’t let you specify the default icon again for that shortcut. This requires manual editing of the URL file and we don’t recommend doing that. For your convenience, we have added the IE_STD.ICO file to the FavOrg folder. This is the standard IE icon that you can re-assign to any shortcut. You can achieve the same result by using Assign custom icon... and selecting URL.DLL from the system folder.

4/ The Edit URL... command allows you to change the target URL of the Internet shortcut.

5/ You can change the status of any item (or of any selection of items or folders) by using the Set / View status... command. Sometimes, you’ll need to do that because you may know that a link is valid although it has been reported as a dead link or because there was a timeout while checking this item. The status of every link is remembered and stored over sessions.

6/ Any selection of shortcuts can be sent to the Recycle Bin by using the Send to Recycle Bin command. Please note that using this command against Internet shortcuts stored in a network shared folder is equivalent to a permanent deletion. We do not recommend using a Favorites folder shared over a network. FavOrg has not been designed to support this configuration. Doing so will lead to minor but very annoying problems.

7/ The Tools menu has a command named Delete by status.... This dialog box will allow you to send all items having a given status to the Recycle Bin. For example, you may decide that all items having the site not found status should be deleted. Please be aware that FavOrg’s accuracy depends on the information returned by the Web server. If you doubt, check the link manually before deleting it.

8/ The Reset dead links to root will update all the links that currently have the Page not found status. After processing, these links will no longer point to the original page but to the root of the target Web site. This operation cannot be undone. All the links that have been reset to root will be marked with the following status icon:

 .

9/ You can also directly edit the name of any shortcut by hitting the F2 key or clicking it twice (like in Windows Explorer).

Overview

Using FavOrg

Commands

Support


Working online

When working online, FavOrg can find and download favicons for your favorite Web sites and it will also check the validity of these links. Of course, you’ll need an Internet connection to do that. If there’s an already active connection on your system, FavOrg will use it. Otherwise, it will try to dial-up (a dial-up dialog box will be displayed - in that case, you’ll have the opportunity to close the connection when exiting FavOrg).

The Go! button will trigger the online actions that you have requested. There are two options that you can set before clicking on the Go! button:

If the Find favicons option is not checked, FavOrg will only check the validity of the selected Internet shortcuts. It will not try to download and install any favicon.

If the Update redirected links option is checked, FavOrg will automatically update the shortcuts pointing to a page that has been marked as relocated (permanently moved) by the webmaster. This will avoid a redirection step the next time you’ll connect to that page. Shortcut to pages marked as temporarily moved are never updated by FavOrg.

If you didn’t select any item in the favorites tree, FavOrg will process the whole tree. If you selected one or more folders, it will process these folders and their subfolders. If you only selected shortcuts, FavOrg will process these shortcuts only. Due to a limitation of the Windows tree control, you can only select sibling items (that is, items located at the same level in the tree) when doing a multiple selection. Instead of selecting shortcuts, you can select folders. FavOrg will process all the items in those folders and their subfolders.

Before starting a search, please look at the Tools | Options dialog box to set a few important options. If you have a permanent connection to the Internet (cable, xDSL, network gateway, proxy,...), you should check the "Do not test connection" option in this dialog box.

When you are ready, click on the Go! button, sit back and relax. The status bar will give indications about the status of the current task. If you are processing more than a few dozens of items, you can even consider getting a cup of coffee or working on another project. Checking the URLs of your favorites, downloading and installing favicons takes time. How many time FavOrg will need to do its job depends on the speed of your connection but not only. FavOrg uses some internal Windows mechanisms that are slow by nature. So, if you have two or three thousands Internet shortcuts stored in your favorites folder, be prepared for a lengthy process. Click on the Cancel action button to stop the process at any time.

When FavOrg has finished processing the selected shortcuts, you’ll see that the status icons have been updated and that the shortcuts pointing to a Web site where a favicon is available are now associated with this icon. Here is the meaning of the status icons:

Be aware that some sites sometimes report wrong codes for a given page. We can’t nothing against that. Also, if a site has been reported as unreachable, this may be because it is currently down or because it no longer exists. There’s no safe way to make a difference. Just check this link later. If it is still unreachable, the site probably no longer exists. Use the Tools | Show legend menu to display display the legend window shown above.

If a favicon has been found for a given site, FavOrg will have downloaded the icon file to the folder specified in Change favicons folder... . Then, it will have updated the shortcut file so that Internet Explorer and any menu shortcut will now use this icon instead of the standard Internet Explorer icon. The change is reflected automatically in the favorites bar in IE 5.0 and above. If you are using IE 4.0, you must close it and reload to see the changes. This change also applies to the Internet shortcuts in the Links bar.

You can now disconnect and work offline

Overview

Using FavOrg

Commands

Support?