In my previous article I broke down the URL acronyms for the popular Craig’s List “cars & trucks” category. To take the idea a step further here’s a quick tutorial outlining the steps necessary to create a Windows desktop launch icon that will open your browser to your preferred sub-section of the cars & trucks category.

Figure out the exact Craig’s List URL you want

Open your preferred browser and navigate, as you normally do, to your favorite Craig’s List category.  In my case that URL is cars & trucks by owner in the Boston area and looks like this:

http://boston.craigslist.org/cto/

Create a URL specific desktop launch icon in Firefox

1. Make sure that Firefox is displaying your page in a tabbed window. If it’s not, simply open another tab by selecting File -> New Tab. Now you should have at least 2 pages open and each one in its own tab
2. Hover your mouse over the little graphic that appears on the tab. This image is known as a favicon

3. With your mouse, left click and hold the favicon
4. Still holding the mouse button, drag the tab down to the Windows quick launch taskbar

5. Remain holding this “ghost” image of the tab over the quick launch taskbar for a few seconds. If done correctly, all open applications will minimize and you’ll see your desktop
6. Again, still holding the mouse button, drag the “ghost” tab image up to your desktop and release

Now you’ve got an icon that will launch Firefox and take you directly to your favorite section of Craig’s List.

Create a URL specific desktop launch icon with Internet Explorer

With Internet Explorer, creating a desktop launch icon is even easier than it is with Firefox.  Here’s how:

1. As previously described, start Internet Explorer and navigate to your favorite section of Craig’s List
2. Hover your mouse over an empty section of the page and right click
3. From the pop-up menu select Create Shortcut

4. When prompted to save a shortcut to your desktop, answer “Yes”

That’s all there is to it.

Change the URL specific desktop launch icon to something more meaningful

Follow the above steps for either browser too often and before you know it, you’ll have a desktop covered in your browser’s launch icon. Too many of the same icons makes it difficult to quickly find the right one to launch and all that work you did to make things faster was wasted.  You can, however, solve this problem by changing the launch icon and descriptive text to something more meaningful.  Here’s how:

1. Start by getting some free icons from any one of a number of sites that give away these tiny image files in ICO format. I’ve downloaded several icon sets from VistaIcons.com. You can get free icons from that site, or you can use Google to search for other free icon sites
2. If these files come as a set in a compressed file, uncompress the file and place these images in a convenient directory.  Mine are in a directory called “icons” located in my personal user folder on my computer (e.g. C:\Bret\icons)
3. Next, with your mouse, right-click on the desktop launch icon you want to change
4. From the pop-up menu select Properties
5. In the pop-up properties box the Web Document tab should be displayed. If not, click on the various tab headings until you find the tab that has the “Change Icon” button

6. Press the Change Icon button and the icon dialog box appears

7. The default program icon appears. In the case of Firefox, you should have 3 “default” icons displayed
8. Click on the Browse button and navigate to the directory where you installed your downloaded icon images

9. Find a meaningful icon and click Open
10. You’ll be taken back to the properties dialog box where the newly selected icon appears where the 3 default icons once did

11. Click OK to proceed
12. At this point you could click OK to finalize the icon change, but for now just click Apply
13. Now, to change the descriptive text, click on the General tab and you’ll see the descriptive text in a field at the top of this tab in the properties dialog box

14. Click your mouse anywhere in this text field
15. Click HOME to quickly move your cursor to the start of this text line
16. Hold down the SHIFT key and then press the END key on your keyboard. This will highlight the entire line of descriptive text
17. Press DEL or DELETE on your keyboard to remove this line of text
18. Now the field is empty and you can type something short and meaningful to associate with this launch icon
19. Press OK when finished.

Now you have a convenient desktop launch icon that will open your browser to the exact location on Craig’s List that you want to browse.  Of course, these steps don’t just apply to Craig’s List.  Simply substitute the URL to any of your favorite web sites where I inserted Craig’s List and you can create the same type of custom quick launch icon on your Windows desktop.

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Filed under: How-To & Tech Tips