Facon

Facon has nothing to do with bacon. It's a joining of the
words: 'Favorite' and 'Icon'. But it is pronounced like bacon.


			BACKGROUND
With Internet Explorer 5, MS introduced the favicon.ico file.
This is a regular windows icon file that's placed in the root
directory of a website(www.virginpi.com/favicon.ico). IE uses
this icon when the site is added to the favorites.
Unfortunately IE only downloads the icon once, and places it
in the cache. So then once you fill-up or flush the cache,
the icon is no longer available.


			WHAT'S IT DO?
The purpose of facon is to search through all the user's
Favorites, find any that have a favicon.ico file. Download
the icon. Then change each Favorite file to use it's
downloaded icon.

OR

Facon can just search through the Favorites, and download the
icons to the cache. But not change the Favorites. This will
allow IE to use the files, but is only temporary(eventually
they are flushed from the cache again).


			WHAT'S BAK2URL
Before facon changes a Favorite file, it makes a backup copy
with the same name but with a .bak extension. Bak2url takes
the backup .bak file and overwrites the modified .url file.

Another function of bak2url is to find any orphaned icons,
icons in the Favorites directory which aren't being used
by any of the favorites. Then allows you to selectively
delete any that it finds.


			ERRORS
Sometimes facon won't be able to download the icons, this
can be caused by an outdated Favorite that points at a
non-existent file. Or a server problem causing a timeout.
Clicking OK will let facon continue. Clicking Cancel will 
stop facon from doing anymore work.
Also, icons won't be saved if they don't have a valid icon
header(0x00000100).


			NOTES
The icons that facon downloads are saved in the same place
as your Favorites, but with the Hidden file attribute. This
should keep them from being viewed in IE's Favorites listing.
The filename for each icon is created from the URL that it
was downloaded from. For the tech-minded it's 4 bytes in hex
with a .ico extension.
The .bak files are also saved with the Hidden file attribute,
and are saved in the same directory as the originals.


Be sure to read the License.txt file.

Ken Nign
www.VirginPi.com