Cocktail Party Geek: I know a Shortcut Part 1
This is a two parter – mainly because there are two useful types of shortcuts available to the world. The first, and the topic of this article, is the kind of shortcut you find on your desktop.
What you need to know
Basically, there are two things that make up those icon shortcuts on your computer:
The link – Each shortcut has a simple link in it. As you can see from my screenshot below, the URL connects my shortcut to my web link.
This example is for a web link, but what is perhaps rather confusing about the situation is a link can also refer to a file.
If you’re running Windows XP, then you can easily add either type of shortcut by right clicking on your desktop and choosing new –> shortcut.
On a Mac, the process is about the same – right click or control click on your icon then choose make alias (that is the fancy pants Mac word for shortcut).
Once you add a new shortcut, you’ll be prompted to “type the location of the itemâ€, as shown below. This is the crucial step – if you type a web address, 
then your shortcut will be a web link.
However, if you type a file address, then your shortcut will be a a file link.
For this process on a Mac, you’re going to need to do a bit of research. Try this link first.
The Icon – The second part of the shortcut is the icon. The Icon is pulled from one of two places (before you change it…). If you’re linking to a program or folder, windows knows what kind of icon to use. If you create a shortcut for website, the site’s icon will be used (if the site has bothered to put one in) otherwise, it will appear as a web document (again chosen by Windows). Each of the statements above is entirely true for Macs too (just replace the word Windows with Mac OS).
This should be enough to get you creating shortcuts on your home machine. Remember that you can examine any icon on your desktop by right clicking and selecting properties (Get Info on a Mac).
What you don’t need to know
Icons can be changed to any .ico file that you find. Here are some sites that might be fun:
If you’re using a windows machine and you’re envious of those Mac guys, you can create a Mac-like toolbar of icons using a program like object dock or rocket dock.
You can even create your own icons.
~ab