google gears mod or, the super dorky thing I just did when I should have been studying...

My lovely dj just pointed out that this is the unnecessarily complicated way to do this. You can also just drag a url to the desktop and change the icon. me dorkdork.

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Use Google Gears to create web shortcuts for any site you want in your mac dock:

1) when google gears asks if you want to create a shortcut on the desktop, say yes. 

(I am using the google docs shortcut as an example)

2) duplicate it

3) rename so you know what website it will open

4) right click on the copy.app and "Show Package Contents"

5) open /Contents/MacOS/launch.sh in a text editor

depending on which browser your shortcut uses, the text will say
"#!/bin/sh
"`dirname "$0"`/launch_url_with_browser" '/Applications/Firefox.app' 'http://docs.google.com/'"

OR
"#!/bin/sh
"`dirname "$0"`/launch_url_with_browser" '/Applications/Safari.app' 'http://docs.google.com/'

(you can have a shortcut for each, as long as they have a different name)

7) replace http://docs.google.com/ with the url of the website where you want your shortcut to lead

example of changed version:

"#!/bin/sh
"`dirname "$0"`/launch_url_with_browser" '/Applications/Safari.app' 'http://www.nytimes.com/'

8) change the icon the regular way or by replacing the icons.icns file with a different image

(this site has some useful web app icons)