FavOrg description
The software will help you manage and safely store your favicons

FavOrg allows you to assign an icon of your choice to any of your Internet favorites, even if there’s no favicon available from the corresponding Web site.

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.

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.

Requirements:

· Internet Explorer 4 or higher