One of the many cool features that came out of Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) was the Favourites Icon. This was a little graphic (16x16 pixels in size) that, in IE versions 5.0 onwards, got associated with any web page you added to your My Favourites folder (i.e. your bookmarks list). The way that worked was, when you bookmarked a page (i.e. added it to your MyFavourites folder), IE appended that icon next to the page's entry. And when you looked at your bookmarks list, the icon appeared in the form of a bullet point to the left of the link. That's sort of like the way each section of this website has its own icon associated with it. You can see how that works in the navigation bar on the left side of this page: the insanityWORKS.org section has a red circle associated with it, Nadia's section has a blue triangle, Ameel's has a yellow hexagon, etc.

Now, just as programs have their own icons (i.e. the little graphics you double-click to run the programs), under the Favourites Icon system, websites were allowed to have their own icons as well. To do that you made a 16x16 graphic in any software, created an icon out of it (that's a specific Microsoft Windows-based graphics file format), renamed it favicon.ico, and then placed it in the root folder of your website (ours, for example, is at http://www.insanityworks.org/favicon.ico). Then, whenever IE looked for a webpage in a particular domain, it checked to see if this icon existed. If it did, IE displayed it next to the page's URL in the browser window and also, of course, next to the page's entry in the My Favourites folder. That process has since changed slightly (i.e. you now should specify the icon's location within each web page) but that's still basically how the system works.

Now this was a really cool idea and, eventually, all the other browsers implemented the same thing. The only difference being that the little graphic no longer needs to be an icon file (i.e. of the filetype .ico). It can now be a GIF file (Graphics Interchange Format, popularized by CompuServe, uses the .gif filename extension) or a PNG file (Portable Network Graphics format, is similar to a JPEG but is lossless, uses the .png extension) instead. And since GIFs can be animated, some websites have animated FavIcons too.

When we made version 2 of this website (i.e. the version you're seeing now), we decided to create a FavIcon for insanityWORKS.org as well. You can see it next to the page's URL or title (depending on whether you using tabber browsing or not). However, and finally coming to the point of this long write-up, we discovered recently that the magazine InformationWeek has a FavIcon that is very similar to ours. Here's how similar they are:

insanityWORKs' icon:
Information Weekly's icon:

The whole point of this page then is this: when Ameel created the icon for insanityWORKS, he had no idea that InformationWeek had an icon that was so increadibly similar. That is, he did not plagiarize it off of the magazine (notice how he used the smallercase 'i' and how the red is the insanityWORKS red).

Anyway, well, that's about all we wanted to say (i.e. disclaim) about this topic :)

[Last updated: 12 February, 2007]