I’m a bookmark packrat. OK, I know it is my fault that I end up with thousands of bookmarks and I end up unable to find anything through sheer volume. Which means that eventually I end up deleting 99% of the things just so I can cope. I suspect I’m not the only one with a mess of bookmarks so here’s how I solved my bookmarking issues.
I’ve tried placing everything into categories and it just doesn’t work, some sites just do not categorise well so can get lost in the melee. Not only that but some categories fill up fast and you have a list a thousand sites in one category - and you are back to being unable to find anything. Or you break categories into sub-categories, which has the not so delightful effect of making bookmark adding a major chore required patience or a PHD.
It doesn’t help that browsers haven’t improved much on bookmarking in years, the Mozilla line and Microsoft’s IE are stuck in the dark Netscape days of bookmarking. Flock has tried to update bookmarking by shifting the bookmarks to online services.
I like online bookmarking but only as secondary storage, a backup of your browser bookmarks. Don’t rely on an online service to store all of your bookmarks. What if all your bookmarks are with Blinklist, for example, and they went bust? All your bookmarks gone in a flash. Not that I’m suggesting that’s about to happen to Blinklist, in fact I recommend Blinklist over other online bookmarking services. Good site and they seem nice guys.
The way I’ve started to do organize my bookmarks is very simple, it speeds up my browsing and blogging. It doesn’t work in IE, to mis-quote Gaffe ‘but then what does?’. Safari, Konq, Moz, Firefox, Opera and in fact almost any modern browser can do this as it requires folders on the browser bar. Three of them to be precise:
Primary, Secondary and Tertiary. The how to differs ever so slightly for each browser and OS, I won’t cover them all but I will cover Firefox (Applies to Camino on OS X too) as it behaves same on every OS. Ctrl/Right click your bookmark bar and select New Folder, rename and set up the three folders. The folders are used in the following manner, and this will be familiar to anyone who follows a sport that has leagues:
Primary
Consider this your first division, your top league teams. These are the websites you read every day, the ones you check a lot. Only the best get promoted here and I can’t see this group changing too much.
Secondary
These are your middle tier, sites you might check weekly or when your primary sites offer nothing new. Sites you check in with but not daily. You’ll find this is a fluid, albeit a viscose one, league with promotions and demotions shifting its pattern.
Tertiary
Here’s your wannabe’s, the lower league. This is likely to be your most crowded folder, here’s where infrequently checked sites reside and the temporary bookmarks. Stuff you want to keep but rarely need to look at on a day to day basis.
That’s it, the rest is just further explanation and recommendations.
Never add anything to your Primary folder right away. If you love the site add it to your Secondary folder and see how often you check it, you can always promote the site later, or demote it. If you find something interesting you want to come back to add it to the Tertiary folder, you can delete it later if you need to. I’d keep away from sub-folders in anything other than your Tertiary folder.
So to speed check all your Primary bookmarks you need to right click the Primary folder and select Open in Tabs. Some OS allow you to middle click the folder and it performs the same function. If you are a blogger add your blog into Primary so it opens when your favourite sites do.
It’s a simple three folder approach, it takes a little discipline but is straightforward enough that you can follow it without firing too many synapses or taking time over things.
Have you noticed I skipped a stage? How do move bookmarks from your old 800 folders and 3000+ boormarks to the three folder system? Aha, well spotted young Padawan, I was trying to avoid the issue. The real answer is any way you want – if you want more than this I offer you two last pieces of advice on bookmarks:
1. Export your current bookmarks*, delete all your current boormarks and visit your favourite sites from memory, adding them to the folders as you go. The kruft will build back up over time and you always have your backup, right?
2. Export your current bookmarks*, now open them in batches into tabs. Drag and drop from the address bar, where it says www.creationrobot.com, to the appropriate folder on the browser toolbar. Long winded, personally I’d go for the former solution.
* In Firefox you can do this by: Bookmarks, Manage Bookmarks, Export.
1 response so far ↓
1 Creation Robot | Blog Archive | Speedy Blogging - Weed n Feed your Enteries Fast // Jun 4, 2006 at 6:02 PM
[...] Firstly I suggest you read my post on Bookmarking, it’s make your browsing a little faster. [...]
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