Firefox 3 now stores bookmark data in a SQlite file named “places.sqlite”.  This makes it harder to go in make manual changes to your bookmarks.  Additionally, Favicon Picker 2 for Firefox doesn’t work with FF3.

This is how I accomplished a manual refresh of the favicon image on my bookmarks toolbar…  To get into the .sqlite file, and manually “refresh” the favicon icon for my bookmark toolbar, I installed the SQlite Manager Add-on for Firefox.

Now After installing the Add-on, I fired it up via “Tools–>SQlite Manager”.  To open up the places db choose “Database->Connect Database”, then locate the “places.sqlite” file (C:\Documents and Settings\User Name\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\”default profile”\places.sqlite on a windows xp machine) and open it.

Once opened, click on the table named “moz_favicons” listed on the left hand side. This will load the favicon db.  Click the tab “Browse & Search”.  Now either manually search through the results or click on the search button and enter the url of the favicon for the bookmark you wish to refresh (example: http://www.google.com/favicon.ico), into the empty field next to the big aqua colored arrow on the “url” line. The click “OK”.

Once you have located the desired favicon, double click the table entry to edit the row.  Click the red “X” that corresponds to the “data (Blob)” field to delete the old cached favicon.ico file for the bookmark. The click “OK”. You will be prompted asking if you want to perform the operation, click “OK”.

Now close the database by going to “Database->Close Database”. Click “OK” when prompted.  Now close SQlite Manager, and then close Firefox. Upon re-opening Firefox 3 you will see that the bookmark you edited no longer has a favicon.  Visit the bookmark and you will see the updated favicon on the tab.  The new favicon image for the bookmark will show up after restarting Firefox one more time.

That’s a heck of a lot of work to refresh a favicon, but if you have a new favicon and you’re dying to see it show up next to your bookmark on the bookmark toolbar in Firefox 3, then this is how you will have to do it until someone makes a nice Add-on which does it for you.

*note that this is the external IP address of your cable modem and/or your router, not the local IP address of your computer on your personal network. Interested in the code? It’s from the getenv() man page at php.net. Get it here. Learn about it here.

<ul>
<?php
$myposts = query_posts('showposts=10&offset=0');
foreach($myposts as $post) :?>
<li>
<a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>">
<?php echo substr(the_title("","", FALSE), 0, 24) . "..."; ?>
</a>
</li>
<?php endforeach; ?>
</ul>

*excuse the poor indentation/structure, having a little hiccup with the syntax highlighter

This will show an unordered list containing the 10 most recent posts. If you want to exclude the most recent post, change the ‘offset’ from 0 to 1. To alter the number of posts displayed, change the number corresponding to ’showposts’. Each post title is truncated to display the first 24 characters. To modify the display length, change the ‘24′ in the substring method to your liking. To display the entire post titles, just get rid of the substr function call which is wrapping the call to the_title().

To learn more about the other parameters available for ‘query_posts’ to fine tune the output even more, visit the Wordpress codex.

If you want to always browse your e-mail with high-grade encryption (AES-256 256 bit),  a more secure encryption than most banks use, just change you Gmail bookmark to point to https://mail.google.com/mail/.  You will be sent to a secure page to login, and once you are authenticated, you session will remain encrypted while you read/send mail.

Update: Google added the ability for Gmail users to always have https enabled.  You can enable this feature by clicking on “settings” at the top of the page and choosing “Always use https” under “Browser Connections”. You can read the google blog post about it here.  You can read the instructions on how to do it here.