you know those icons that show up next to your bookmarks? like yahoo's bookmark has a little Y next to it? how do you create and set up your site to do that?

It's called a favicon. You create a '.ico' file, 16x16 pixels and 16 colors, save it to your document root, and let the browsers know it's there by adding this to the head of your documents:
<LINK REL="SHORTCUT ICON" HREF="http://www.domain.tld/favicon.ico">

wow, thanks, bear.

so i just need the "link" tag at the top of any page i create and then the favicon.ico file stored in the right place?

You can use any type of image file, your not just restricted to .ico files. For example:

GIF
<link rel="icon" href="images/icon.gif" type="image/gif">

JPG
<link rel="icon" href="images/icon.gif" type="image/jpg">

PNG
<link rel="icon" href="images/icon.gif" type="image/png">

:)

Originally posted by johnsonl33
wow, thanks, bear.

so i just need the "link" tag at the top of any page i create and then the favicon.ico file stored in the right place?
Yes, that's right. As for the other types of images, I haven't seen that listed in the specs, but I haven't looked in some time. It may have changed.

check http://www.favicon.com/ they have some useful information regarding fav icon :)