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 also allows you to assign an icon of your choice 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).

Note: complete source code is included.

Png2ico is a free and useful utility that converts PNG files to Windows icon resource files. If youre looking for a program to create a favicon.ico for your website, look no further. If you need instructions or dont even know what a favicon is, check out my short tutorial on how to create and install a favicon.ico.

The program is extremely simple to use. To create a favicon.ico that contains a logo in the resolutions 16x16 and 32x32 (an icon can contain multiple images of different sizes, but a single 16x16 image is enough for a favicon), you would use a command like the following:

png2ico favicon.ico logo16x16.png logo32x32.png

ATTENTION! This is a console application without a Graphical User Interface (i.e. no icons, no mouse)! You have to launch it either from the console or via Start/Run. You can NOT just double-click it.

Adsen FavIcon is a simple favicon freeware maker that lets people make a fav icon for their website, which shows up in IEs favorites.

It can use either bmp or jpg files, and will convert them to ico format using the size and color quality you choose.

Not only can you create fav icons, but it can also be used for creating icons for programs.

Adsen FavIcon comes with notes on what settings to use for making fav icons and how to install them.

Google Icon is a small Firefox extension that will enhance search results by adding the favicon next to each search result (if available). Icons will make it easier to recognize your favorite websites and breathe more life into that dull Google search page.

Added "FaviconizeTab" to the context menu of the tab. If it is clicked, the width of the tab will become small up to the size of favicon.

Blank Title is a Firefox extension that blanks all windows and tabs titles, hides favicon or site icon, hides url or address bar, and hides search bar. Shows address bar when mouse hovers over. And now includes my imagepref extension built-in. Show images and hide images using a status bar button without reloading.

Website Toolbox Pro is a collection of over 30 generators, Web 2.0 elements, tools and scripts for webmasters and web designers to speed up website building and save time and money. Website Toolbox Pro includes: a color palette generator that generates palettes of perfectly matched colors for your design needs, a gradient image generator, 56 hatch background styles, including popular stripe backgrounds, rounded corners for website tables, a favicon generator that is able to create a favicon from any image, .htaccess, .htpasswd and mod_rewrite generators, a regular expression creator that makes creating, learning and testing regular expressions much easier, robots.txt file creator, website translation script, most popular javascripts (Add To Favorites, Anti-Spammer Email, Break Out Of Frames, Countdown, No Right Click, Popup Window, Print This Page, Random Text, ...) and more.