Slashdot Mirror
Organizing Your Bookmarks?
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.
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.
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 (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.
--
The Happy Blues Man
I accept on blind faith that Cincinatti exists.
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 hope that makes sense...
ufdraco
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
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!
(darren)
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.
It's 11pm, do you know what your deamons are up to?
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.