Have you ever needed, or just wanted, to make a shortcut icon on the the desktop in Mac OS X? Honestly it’s relatively trivial to do but the result isn’t always what people expect. My goal is to demonstrate how to create a web page shortcut that is easily identifiable. This is something handy for teachers who want to make it easier for their students to access specific websites, or a business that wants to publish an icon for their customer login page.

Step 1. Launched Safari and navigate to the page you would like to bookmark on the desktop. In figure 1 I have opened Olivent.com.

Step 2. Drag the URL, usually by grabbing the FavIcon, to the desktop. Refer to figure 2 for details.

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• Select the Keyboard preference pane. Click the Shortcuts tab. Select App Shortcuts in the left column and click the + button. Select Finder.app in the Application field.

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Step 3. You’ll notice a new @ HTTP icon on your desktop similar to Figure 3 with the title of the link you dragged. More than likely you would like to change this to something a little more meaningful, since all of the shortcuts to web links you create will have this same icon.

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Step 4. To change the icon to something a bit more meaningful open the info page for the item by either selecting the item and hitting COMMAND-I or right click (hold the control key while clicking) on the item to display the context menu as demonstrated in Figure 4.

Step 5. Once the info page is open return to the web page you created the shortcut for and select something that makes it easily identified and screen capture is with COMMAND-CONTROL-SHIFT-4 (don’t worry it does take 2 hands). You’ll be able to select a portion of the page in Figure 5 I have selected only the company logo.

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Step 6. This image will be copied into the system buffer and you need to return to the item’s info page and click on the mini icon in the upper left corner which will highlight in blue. Simply hit COMMAND-v to paste the image from step 5. Figures 6 and 7 display the before and after effect of this operation.

Before:

After:

Step 7. Finally examine the icon on the desktop. It should look something like Figure 8, which you can now drag to your dock bar.

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Regardless of your reasons for creating a web page shortcut I am certain that after reading this you agree that it is extremely easy to do in Mac OS X. I hope that you have enjoyed this tutorial and will leave a kind comment as well as support our sponsors. Remember clicking on an add helps us keep the lights on so that we can bring you more of this high quality programming.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Mikel King (http://twitter.com/mikelking) has been a leader in the Information Technology Services field for over 20 years. He is currently the CEO of Olivent Technologies, a professional creative services partnership in NY. Additionally he is currently serving as the Secretary of the BSD Certification group as well as a Senior Editor for BSD News.