Like a lot of people I belong to a few Social Networking websites (Linkedin, Facebook, MySpace, etc..) and a lot of times when you want to check on one you want to check up on all of them. The issue I had was that I didn’t want to change my home pages. I say pages because I take advantage of the multiple tab feature of today’s browsers, and with the click of an icon I’m up to date on several blogs that I follow.

So I don’t want to change my favorites but I want to open up multiple pages, what to do? After a quick search on the internet I found that with Mozilla Firefox you can make a quick addition to the short cut to open up a different set of web pages.

Keep in mind these directions are only for Firefox, but will work similarly for Google Chrome. If you are using Internet Explorer 7 or 8 these instructions are not going to work for you.

The first step involves adding a short cut to your desktop. To do this;

1. Right mouse click on a blank portion of your desktop.

2. From the menu choose “New”. A Sub-menu will be generated.

3. Choose “Shortcut” from your list of options.

4. The following Dialog box should appear.

5. Click the Browse button and navigate to the following directory, c:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox. From the list of files choose the Firefox.exe, and then click the Okay button.

6. Finish by choosing the “Next” button and then the “Finish” Button. This will add the Firefox icon to your desktop.

These steps also work for putting a short cut to Google Chrome on your desktop, but the path to the Chrome.exe is different.

7. Once the Shortcut has been created right mouse click on it and from the menu choose “Properties”. The Properties dialog box should appear. Select the Shortcut tab.

8. You will see the “Target:” field and in the field should be the path to the Firefox executable. Eg. “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\Firefox.exe”. At the end of the statement add any and all websites you want, just add a space between each address.

1. I repeat the process grouping the websites with common functionality to a different Icon

As an example:

Let’s look at the Firefox Icon I’ve set up to follow some video games I’m interested in. I edit the Target: field to read as the following,

“C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe” http://www.starcraft2.com http://www.commandandconquer.com http://www.bungie.net

In the properties this will appear as one long line without line breaks. As you can see though there are spaces in between each web site I want to open.

If I open my regular Firefox Icon I see the home page that I’ve set up.

If I double click the Icon I’ve set up for my favorite video games, you’ll see that my browser now only opens up those web sites I’ve told it to in the target path.

Keep in mind I am opening multiple web sites, it will take longer to open up because I’m asking the web browser to do more work.

I didn’t have a chance to test out doing this for any other browser, so if you use Netscape, or Safari or any other browser, drop us a line and let us know if you tried it and how it turned out.