If you haven’t had a chance to do it yet, fire up Dashboard and type “icon” into the Dictionary (which is of COURSE opened all the time, right?? Ok, ok, so you don’t like the Dashboard. Then try double-clicking on the word “icon” in Safari control-clicking and choosing “Look Up in Dictionary” or selecting the word and holding down command-control-d. Jesus Christ! (If none of this sounds familiar to you, you’re not using the latest version of OSX and I feel for you. Truly.)

Ok, education’s out of the way, now’s the time for fun! As you’re traveling around this great big internet, I’m sure you’ve dropped by places such as the IconFactory, Dimensions of Deskmod, InterfaceLift, and others in order to adorn your desktop with all manner of just-for-you uniqueness. But there’s that small part of your brain... the bit juust to the left of the part that spends the day toiling endlessly doing calculations, feasibility studies, and social analysis of exactly what you’re going to do with your lottery winnings... that has been pondering how neat it would be to be able to use these icons on your iWeb pages. You know, a flash of artwork here and there can really liven things up a bit and help to give even the plainest of pages your own common theme.

So, knowing how well OSX handles draggin’ and droppin’, you probably attempted to drag an icon into iWeb. But, you see, it’s not QUITE that easy. Icons LOOK like little pictures but in use they’re stand-ins for the files on your system. When you drag and drop that into iWeb, well, iWeb sees you dropping a file onto it and embeds it appropriately! It even automatically creates a hyperlink with the name of the file just ready to publish. Then, iWeb probably looks at you puzzled as to why you’re not happy with the result...

But, NEVER FEAR! (never fear icons, anyway) To solve your predicament, you just need to GET some INFORMATION... that’s kind of a hint for the Get Info command that can be found by right-clicking or control-clicking an icon and choosing Get Info or clicking a file and doing a Command-I.

Now, after you’ve done either of those, a window will pop up that has some information in it. Lots of info actually, but we’re only interested in the very top section on the left. Right there, as indicated, you’ll see a micro-sized image of the icon there. In the image above, I’m showing you what it looks like AFTER clicking it to show that there will be a very slight blue highlight around it if you’ve clicked it right. Now, before you click anywhere else, press Command-C to copy. Now, you’ve got an image of the icon on your clipboard. Those of you who’ve been visiting for awhile probably know what’s coming next! I’ve got an image on the clipboard and I want to use it in another application... what FREE piece of software that is on your hard drive right now that can help in this endeavor? Preview! We’re gonna Preview Passthru it.

For those new to my blog, here are the steps. You can click on the link above to read more about it.

After the copy,

Open Preview,

Press Command-N (create new file),

Press Command-S,

Choose a location and Save.

Now, the image is ready to be inserted into iWeb for decoration, information, or many other -ation’s.

The question has arisen, “Why go through the trouble of saving? Can’t I just copy out of Preview directly into iWeb?” First, you get a rap on the knuckles for asking the question. Why? Just because everyone could use a random knuckle rapping every now and then. Second, why yes, Jimmy Jimmy, you COULD have done that, but it would have pasted into iWeb as something generic like “droppedimage.pict”. I have found in my many years of iWeb use (at this point, forget that it was introduced in Jan ‘06) that it’s always a good practice to have unique names for all your images. Depending on how iWeb stores and uses those images, it may just append numbers to force them to be unique OR, at publish time, cause some images to be overlaid with the wrong like-named image. So, while chances are low that this could happen. Chances are zero that it could happen if you just take a second to give it a unique name.

ALRIGHT! You! You there! The one with the knuckles! You look like you could use a good rapping!