I recently decided to rework my Firefox favorites bar and pretty much deleted all the folders on there. I have the feeling they might one day slowly creep back on, but for now at least my favorites bar is sleek and mean. I realized among other things that there were actually relatively few links on my favorites bar that I used frequently so with that in mind I deleted everything which wasn’t essential and was left with about 10-15 entries. Now heres the rub.
Most sites these days have a favicon.ico in their top directory that shows up in your internet explorer, firefox or opera address bar as a little 16×16 pixel icon next to the address. It’s a pretty little aesthetic touch that’s not necessary but still looks cool. The icon for my site is actually just an experiment and pretty ugly, I will be doing a new one. Jeeezuz, I just realized as I’m typing that it’s not disimilar from the famous Netscape logo. Heh. I’ll keep that one under my hat.
Anyhow, as I said, the rub. I realized that because of the customised icons I could entirely do away with the text next to each logo, so for instance " Slashdot" becomes simply
. This work with most sites because it’s quite common to have site icons now. So now I have the likes of
,
,
&
on my firefox bar in a neat little row. neato.
Because it’s easier to associate images with an address - well I do - than read out the address name this seems like a much more logical and useful way to have 1-click favorites arranged.
However, there are a few problems, but there are some easy solutions for them as well. The main problem is that while a lot of sites do have customised icons, some don’t, so if you drag them onto the FF favorites bar then all you are left with is a normal firefox bookmark icon, which makes it impossible to identify which site you ar actually going to click on. What’s the solution? Firefox Favicon Picker!
Favicon Picker can be downloaded here. It allows you to right click on any icon in your favorites and change its icon to anything of your liking. I think this is an absolutely essential extension for anyone who happens to use the internet so much that they get swamped with a massive favorites list.
On a more technical note I have to add that I didn’t actually alight on Favicon Picker immediately, as I tried to develop my own custom solution using a greasemonkey script. It almost worked, and has still been of great use and fun and you can see it here. If you know how to install greasemonkey scripts then go check out ebuyer.com and check out their icon. If you don’t have my script you won’t see any icon as they seem to not have their own favicon. This was problematic and annoying to me as I frequently check ebuyer, if just to see if a price on a product has gone up or down.
I discovered though that using greasemonkey you can add/replace the address bar icon, I can’t take full credit for that script as I downloaded it and edited it to my own specs from the excellent userscripts.org.
One of the most interesting aspects of the script for me is inlining the icon itself. I didn’t realize that this was possible, but you can inline graphics using the right set of tools to for instance keep the graphic inside the script rather than refer to an external file.This has many exceptional uses, but for me it meant that I could inline a custom icon for ebuyer.com and include it inside the body of the script. I think this is amazing. It may not blow anyone else away but to me it kicks ass.
So as of late I’ve had a little fun with greasemonkey, tinkered with my ‘puter (strokes his lappy) and danced with badgers, naked on the heath. Life is good.
