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Organizing Your Bookmarks? 26

Posted by Cliff from the replacing-the-string-on-the-finger-trick dept.
ckrause asks: "What is everybody using to keep their bookmarks organized? I tried backflip.com but their indexing engine didn't work very well and their search engine was even worse. The problem is that I have got so many good bookmarks, but I have no way to find the one I am looking for. How is everybody handling this? Are you using some software or are you just browsing through them every time you are trying to find that special page you bookmarked three months ago? I think this is a major usability issue for the web. It is one thing to remember Amazon.com when you need a book, but it is impossible to memorize some page three clicks deep on some fully scripted WWW site." (Read More)

A good question, but I must ammend to this a bit. Tracking bookmarks is not a usability issue for the web. It's an organizational issue on the client side. Therefore solutions that work for one person may not always work for everybody. With that said, it would still help out to share ideas and let ckrause pick the method (or combination of methods) that will work the best for him.
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Organizing Your Bookmarks? More

Organizing Your Bookmarks?

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  • I just use my.yahoo.com [yahoo.com].

    You can put the bookmarks in subfolders if you like, and you can collapse sections you don't want. This has the benefit of portability.

    I always have my.yahoo.com loaded in my first browser window, and I click open new windows any time I visit a bookmarked site. Setting up your browser to keep highlighted 'recently visited' sites highlighted for a month makes anything which you haven't been to (and likely worth a visit or a cull as a result) stand out in the list. Clicking a bookmark section header open in a new window lets you insert and remove bookmarks fairly quickly.

  • The "this" of "This has the benefit of portability" being the use of Yahoo, not the collapsing system. Brain fart - missing &ltP&gt.

  • bk2site (Score:3)

    by cybersquid ( 24605 ) on Wednesday April 12, 2000 @12:22PM (#1136743) Homepage
    I use bk2site [sourceforge.net]. This generates a nice series of yahoo-like HTML pages from my netscape bookmarks file.

    A cron job updates the pages once an hour. There's even a search feature.

    Of course, you'll still want to do some organizing and categorizing.

  • OS/2 (and possibly KDE or Gnome?) provides a very nice facility to store bookmarks in the filesystem. The name of the file is the 'bookmark' and the contents, in plain ASCII, is the URL. With lots of subdirectories this makes it very easy for me to locate bookmarks based on subject, and if that fails, any standard file searching tool (locate for bookmark names, grep for when you know part of the URL) works.

    It also works across a LAN with shared filesystems, but for for access from anywhere on the 'Net, you'll have to use either one of these weird bookmark sites (sorry, I just can't get used to it), or else try your own LDAP server.
  • I have thought about this a bit since posting the question and what what I have thought of is something along the lines of a database coupled with a google-like daemon. You add bookmarks to the database. The daemon goes out to the page and caches the page in the database. The google daemon (god) then suggests a catagory to file it in. The user, or course, can hand tweak the suggestion. When you are looking for the bookmark a search can be run against any or all of the following: page title, URL, catagory(ies), or FTS of the cached page.
  • It may sound archaic, but I just go to Bookmarks:Edit Bookmarks and make catagories by hand. After that, unless I make a subfolder, they aren't catagorized, but it works... I have some 300+ bookmarks and could probably find any one with a limited search time.

    It's really the only way for me to do it... I also extract all the links for my Random Link Generator [wpi.edu] (yeah, I know, inspired use of perl... took about 5 minutes work).

    But I do add a good 5-10 links per day from various weblogs. Even a little catagorization can cut down on search time when I look through my Bookmarks menu, even if it's not that great.

    --
  • See www.powermarks.com. This is, AFAIK, the closest match to a bookmark organizer. I found it deficient because it doesn't allow folder organization - you have to search, period, which is often a very crappy way of finding a bookmark. They say "Innovative search interface provides fast and easy access to your bookmarks - no hierarchies to sort, order and arrange". What this means is "A thousand bookmarks which you used to have in two dozen folders now in one folder, sorted alphabetically, where you can't find anything at all and you can no longer export them except into one really, really big folder." Bleh.

    Whenever someone comes out with a bookmark organizer that allows and preserves folders, yet also allows quick and easy searching, or better yet *self-organizes* bookmarks into folders all by its lonesome, by looking at the content of the pages or whatever, it'll sell a million copies.
    --
    Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
  • I have a system that is ever evolving to serve my page finding needs. Here are some of the rules I follow to keep organized.

    -If I recieve an amusing or informative url in an e-mail message, but I don't have any desire to goto it daily or weekly, but I still wanna have it to share or for reference, I just save the email message in a folder and if I need the url, I'll just go through my saved mail messages.

    -all my urls that I visit daily (Slashdot, Attrition, Drudge, Cruel Site, etc) I keep right in the links bar of my browser for immeadiate access. If you have too many daily sites to fit the links bar conviniently, create a folder in your links bar that will drop down with all your sites nice and convienient.

    -sites that I find usefull or that I will access at a later date in the near future, I put in a folder ON my links bar, so I can handle them with out throwing them into the abyss of my bookmarks menu, and have them at a touch in a convienient place.

    -I separate sites that have items I may wish to purchase from sites that have information for me to read, such as news site or whatnot.

    -a simple rule, if you are just saving the url because you find it somewhat amusing or informative now, and think that maybe you will use it in the future, just pitch it! That's why God created search engines. If you really want if back, you'll find it somewhere.

  • I've had so much fun with various 4 and 5 browsers that I've gone back to Netscape 3.something, but a persisting and increasing problem are these "Bookmarks have changed on disk..." messages, which often show up even when I haven't done anything (that I know of) to change my bookmarks. Anybody have any suggestions, hints, clues, et cetera?
  • this happens when you have executed netscape multiple times. this does not occur if you open multiple windows from one netscape process though

    I hope that makes sense...

  • I also use a similar program written in perl for win32, which takes care of IE bookmarks. You can get it here [perceive.net]. it will also create a yahoo-style site. As for organization, I have a terrible habit of saving anything that looks remotely interesting, so my bookmarks have recently passed the 700 mark. I use categories similar to yahoo, which seem to work quite well. I also use the Links bar for my daily/weekly sites, as someone else has suggested. Hopefully in the near future I will have a search feature for my yahoo interface.

  • freshmeat to the rescue... (Score:3)

    by Slynkie ( 18861 ) <jsalit@@@slunk...net> on Wednesday April 12, 2000 @06:12PM (#1136752) Homepage
    Just posted today: "bookmarker is a WWW-based application for managing bookmarks. It allows multiple users to list, search, maintain, and create bookmarks. It is written in PHP using PHPLIB, which allows support for multiple databases. bookmarker includes functions to store URLs and send URLs via email directly from your browser (quik-mark, mail-this-link) using Javascript functions that link directly to the application. Netscape bookmark import is included as well as public/private settings to allow some/all bookmarks to be shared among users."
    it's appindex record is at http://core.freshmeat. net/appindex/1998/11/22/911774014.html [freshmeat.net]
  • It also happens when the clock changes, usually for Daylight Savings. This is mentioned in Netscape's Knowledge Base, althoug I do not remember exactly where...
  • This is what I do, however, I have yet to find a tool I like completely, that will split them the way I want when generating the links sections of my home page.

    The best tool I've used so far is called Columbine Bookmark Merge, which at least sorts them. I can copy the folder(s) to a new file, which is ok, but very cumbersome. I have found an assortment of tools doing a search on Yahoo with the term "bookmark utility." Perhaps one of them will do the job.
  • My netscape bookmarks are a mess. I usually put them in their own categories (manually), but after a few days browsing I usually have a full screen worth of new ones at the bottom. Most are just crap...

    What I have done, though, is put together a small html file with a table and nice colours of my most frequently visited sites. Yeah, slashdot just happens to be in there... It's set to my startup page, so whenever netscape comes up, I have a list of the sites I go to 95% of the time.

    --C

  • A lot of these ideas (a web site or daemon that keep and categories your bookmarks) are missing one important thing: Using the builtin bookmarking feature of your browser is convenient. The easy solution, of course, is, once you have a web-based interface for adding your bookmarks, you would write some javascript that hits that web site with the current location (document.location) as the query string. Put it in a button on your personal toolbar, or call it through your favorite window managers root menu (netscape --remoteURL(...)), or whatever, and you hit that button instead of the builtin bookmark feature. Or, if you aren't afraid of your .Xresources file, you can add it to your navigation tool bar with a custom icon and everything (isn't X wonderful?)

    darren


    Cthulhu for President! [cthulhu.org]
  • I usually put the interesting links that I find onto my home page so that I know where I have them. One page for each subject (Science stuff, GNU/Linux, document preparation systems, spam, misc etc.).

    I only use the built in Netscape bookmarks feature for links to web based email sites and my own non-public pages.
  • I recently whipped up my own Postgres-backed bookmarks page. The one feature that I'm going to have to add is subcategories of bookmarks, but it is a lot easier than hand-editing a 50k html file of bookmarks, which I was doing before.

    Its publically accessable [tburg.net], except for the editing :-)
    Unfortunately, it still takes a while to move 300+ bookmarks from the 'uncategorized' category into their proper categories, so most are still uncategorized.
  • There is no automated solution to the "Categorization" problem. People still have to manually assign data to library catalogs, Yahoo categories, search engines. You just have to create folders and subfolders for your needs.

    I also use the Netscape browser's Edit:Edit Bookmarks to create folders as needed. When I save a bookmark I always click on Bookmarks:File Bookmark to drop it in the appropriate folder (or my "INBOX" for later categorization).

    My top level folders right now are:

    Computing Linux News (Client 1) (Client 2) (Client 3) Personal Toolbar Manufacturing Printing My Stuff
    The "News" folder has a lot of general news links and these subfolders:
    Linux Trade Web Sites Geek WebLog
    That's a simple folder. My "Computing" and "Linux" folders have subfolders four levels deep.
  • One that I've toyed with (only works on Win32, so probably of limited interest to most of you) is the Brain (http://www.thebrain.com, and/or http://www.thebrain.com/products/desktopbrain/defa ult.htm). It's never quite clicked for me, but it may for someone here. It's not explicitly designed to store bookmarks, though it can do that well.

  • upload Netscape bookmarks file (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Netscape stores bookmarks in a .html file, and it's easiest for me to use my local browser to organize the things. Then once a day I copy bookmarks.html to my web space (automatically on logout), and now I can browse them from elsewhere. (My web area is local, but I'm sure there are easy ways to periodically upload that file automatically to the web.) Upside: easy to manipulate at work, browsable anywhere, searchable with "Find in page" Downside: can't modify anywhere else Trent larson@cs.byu.edu

  • Personal Toolbar Folder (Score:3)

    by Tony Shepps ( 333 ) on Thursday April 13, 2000 @12:22PM (#1136762)
    People don't use this enough. The personal toolbar folder accepts folders, so I've created six folders: Daily, Weekly, Occasional, Search, Portals, Clients/Hot.

    Everything in those folders is one click and one move away from being activated. Because it's Netscape and not IE, the folders aren't automatically alphabetized, so your muscle memory can learn where everything is.

    The Daily contains those things I visit, yes, DAILY. Inside the folders I use horizontal rules to create categories that make sense. This method can bookmark as many as 50 sites that I want to return to on a regular basis.

    The rest of the bookmarks, then, becomes a place to stow stuff that I want to remember, but that I won't visit until there's call for it. And that makes sense for usability -- I'll go a step further to find a shopping folder, references folder, HTML and design folder.

  • Re:Personal Toolbar Folder (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I am married to Netscape 4.x because of the PTF. I can hit my bookmarks barely looking at them.

    I cannot stand how any other browser handles Bookmarks. Netscape's Bookmarks are tight, efficient and intuitive. Mozilla and MSIE have the split screen going on. Who wants 1/3 of their screen taken up by links? Same with Opera. I am full screen user, period.

  • I used Netscape's bookmarks until about the time I had a couple hundred. By then I got tired of the huge menus, forgetting which folder something was in, etc. Most importantly, was I wanted to be able to get to bookmarks when I was on a different computer. Naturally, I turned to MySQL and PHP and came up with a simple Yahoo-esque thing as well. It's very simple and very me-centric, but it gets the job done. A snapshot [jcorey.org] is available if you really want a look. Everything I need 95% of the time is there, search yahoo, google, ftpsearch, deja, latest news from Slashdot/KDE, my own top 10, linux stocks, my modem's current speed/ip. And I dare say, it shows of my web page makin talent (note the colors). :) It's got all the nifty features like caching (ala Google), tells me how many times a site has been down (easy deleting, "delete from Bookmarks where down_times > 5"), etc.

    Anyway, my point is I guess just sit down on night and do it. You get much more enjoyment and use out of something you put your own hard work into.
  • It's not that complicated. I've used my own bookmark system for over a year, and whenever I want to add/search/etc something, I just hit Alt-N in Netscape to pop open a new window at my home page. Netscape's bookmarks are now just my form of Slashdot's submission queue. When I see something I want to keep, I bookmark it. When Netscape's bookmark list gets to be about the height of my monitor, I go through and decide if I really want to keep something and put it in the MySQL database. Netscape's little bookmark bar thing provides another way for getting to the really common sites instantly.
  • If you are talking about those categories in Google [google.com]. The Google [google.com] software didn't make them. They are from the Open Directory Project [dmoz.org]. The directory has been created by humans.

    The directory, created by the Open Directory Project [dmoz.org], is Open Content [dmoz.org]... so anyone can use it for free. And many [dmoz.org] do. (Including Google [google.com].)

    Read this article [kuro5hin.org]... it gives an introduction to the Open Directory Project [dmoz.org].

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