Playing Favorites

FAVICONs (Favorite Icons) started as visual aids to easily select a bookmark from the long lists of bookmarks that tend to accrue in a bookmark collection. As tabbed browsers became more mainstream, the value of these icons increased because they make it easy to find a specific page in a sea of open tabs. While it was never a high priority for Molecular Vision to offer this feature, it seemed like a nice thing to do. I created a simple icon that was easy to associate with the journal:

In January 2005, I linked the parts of the web site describing the journal to the icon and began linking new articles to it. When Molecular Vision migrated to an Apache web server in March 2009, I was able to globally link all pages to the icon.

Having learned how to create and use these icons, I created the following icon for my personal Emory web site in May 2008:

Apparently, I look something like this: