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Suggestions for Browser Bookmark Management?
slashdot_commentator asks: "My bookmark collection has hit a few thousand at this point. Anything that looks interesting, or may be of interest in the future, I tuck away.
I group them in roughly 30 different subfolders based on topic. I've decided I consume too much effort in organizing them, and need to find a better solution. I've looked at radically different systems like del.icio.us, but its not for me. I'm even toying with writing a plugin/replacement to the current built-in bookmark manager. Can anyone recommend a plugin or package? Or alternately, features they would like to see in a 'bookmark manager'?"
Personally, it took me about ten tries before I "got it." Maybe we're both dense, I don't know.
delicious for Firefox rocks, by the way.
there's more than one way to do me.
Around 2002 (or 2001) I wrote a PHP and MySQL bookmark managing app that also uses tags to store information.
It's called BBPS and its GPLed.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/bbps/
You can see a demo of it on my website:
http://edmz.org/bbps/
If you like it, consider donating some code to the project instead of starting your own. I've been on other projects and haven't had the time to update it. (But don't worry, it works as it is)
This paid my last vacation, it mi
check it out FURL
Or alternately, features they would like to see in a 'bookmark manager'?
I'd like to see a feature that will automatically consult an automatic database (similar to CDDB) to get "kosherized" titles for web sites that I bookmark.
For instance, instead of bookmarking, "Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that Matter", it should just add "Slashdot" to my bookmarks. And instead of bookmarking, "MSNBC - Today's News from MSNBC Front Page", it should just bookmark it as "MSNBC".
Even more annoying are site titles containing promotional garbage such as, "GEICO Car Insurance. Get an auto insurance quote and save today. Free online motorcycle quotes as well." What fucknut (other than some marketing schmuck at GEICO) wants THAT whole text to appear as a bookmark?
I get really sick of having to hand-edit all the site titles to be sane and utilitarian. Someone should harness the collective power of the net to solve this.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
is I just upload my bookmarks.html (from firefox) to a webserver. Then when I need them on the road, I just visit the URL. And since firefox keeps them in html-format, you can just view your bookmarks as a webpage. It works well. Try it!
Best regards, A.C.
In my opinion, it's not a good bookmarks manager, though it's helpful for haivng bookmarks available at any computer. What it is, hoewever, is a great way to browse sites that other people really like. That is it's real strength!
Go to URL del.icio.us/tag/xxx where xxx is the keyword people are using and you get a list of lots of cool sites people are bookmarking. /tag/osx yields lots of cool mac OS X links.
I wish there was some way to filter out duplicate URLs, but other than that this is a great way to discover cool new links. Great for going through when your bored!
The real way to solve your problem is with "delete."
But since you probably don't want to do that, a function that checks bookmarks for viability would help you a lot. I bet a lot of those sites you saved are long gone.
If a browser had a rock-solid non-volitle cache, then your history and your bookmarks could manifest out of that. Imagine that every page you've visited was stored in some reasonably light-weight database in the browser and then both auto-catagorized based on some combination of metadata grouping and bayesian analysis as well as available in a type-down filtering/auto-completing searchlike tool or tools.
You could just start typing any content or matching metadata from the site in the urlbar and it would filter on that and present options in the auto-complete pop-up list, maybe with additional ranking based on recency, frequency and user tweaking. Alternately, you could see various views of the auto-catagorization, a la iTunes, with a few simple sorting and flagging tools. Combining recency and frequency, plus user "nudging" of entries (possibly based on a simple TiVo-style thumbs up/thumbs down model) you would be able to find what you're looking for at the top of various folders/menus/treelists with more ease than today's common bookmark managers and it wouldn't require the forethough that you might one day want to find it.
- A
What I want, and have not looked for yet, is something that keeps my bookmarks the same between all my browsers on all my os, on all my systems.
Something that plugs into firefox/mozilla, modifies the links for ie and messes with opera. All of this stored on my server using webdav would be best, but someone else's system is fine for me.
I just want to bookmark a site at work, so I can waste time at home browsing it, and leave work time for work.
I currently just copy the cool urls to a wiki I installed for testing a while back and never took down... hundreds of links in there, most useless really...
On Arrakis: early worm gets the bird. Magister mundi sum!
I hate clicking on a bookmark, and finding out the page has been moved.
Highlight all and press +
It's more fun to rediscover the web, rather than just visiting the same sites all the time.
I used to have hundreds, if not thousands, of bookmarks, but even before Google, I realized that 90% of them could be found again by a search. The added benefit is that if the site moves, or a better site comes along, the search automatically finds them too.
Infuriate left and right
This sounds like a good use for a google-style search. Possibly using Google's Desktop Search?
Why oh why can't I change the favicons, either on my linkbar or my bookmarks? I'm a really visual person, and I find favicons the best way to browse through my links. It's annoying when a site doesn't have one, if they have one I don't like, or when they apply a random one (Netscape icon on the Toronto Star page???) What I'd really love is a plugin that would allow me to change the favicons on my linkbar and in bookmarks. Also visual bookmark folders would be really nice too - like an icon for sports sites, one for school sites, one for games, etc
Random rants about technology: http://technorants.blogspot.com
I have the same problem, because there's a difference in the needs that bookmarks meet and that reference pages create. I want to be able to search reference pages, preferably indexed for speed, and don't expect them to update much. Slashdot, on the other hand, I want to visit and read myself. I bookmark sites like Slashdot and Google News. For reference material, I use scrapbook (a firefox plugin) that allows me to save those pages and index them. It's really handy, and you can sort things into folders. You might want to try that before rolling your own. Scrapbook. Good luck!
best college pickem site ever: pickem.terrbear.org
This is not intended as a flame, but an observation from my own experience. I used to keep tons of bookmarks on a series of HTML pages. It was pretty simple, and I could reorganize via simple cut and paste. (Know thy text editor.)
But after a while, I realized it was taking some additional effort to maintain them. URLs update, site content gets revised, re-statements elsewhere are more helpful, and my interests change.
I also realized as Google continued to improve (4 years ago?) that half the time I was simple googling what I remembered, not paging through my link collection. If a URL went out of date, I would spend only a minute or so re-finding it, not the hours I imagined.
Which leads me to my current system:
I am always pleasantly surprised at how quickly I can google some long-lost page. Or sometimes, I run across another page that is even better, which may have not even existed the first time.
Link collection is a dangerous hobby because one tends to overlook the hidden maintenance costs.
There is no need to use a SlashDot sig for SEO...
http://www.abscindere.com/
It organizes bookmarks in concepts and allows you to make notes on them. It's very usefull once you get the hang on it.
Tabbed browsing has really reduced my need for bookmarks. Instead of bookmarking things, I just open them in another tab.
When the tabs get too small to see the icons I just open another window.
When there are too many windows to keep track of, I just switch to a new desktop.
I would recommend investing in a good UPS if you plan to adopt this system though.
--MarkusQ
Multiple views of the same mass o' bookmarks would be a great start.
- Sort by date created.
- Sort by date site last updated.
- Sort by times you, the user, have gone to that particular bookmark.
- Sort by frequency the site updates.
- Sort by date you have most recently visited that site.
then, keywords from the webpages would be nice, but create keyword categories only if multiple bookmarked pages have those same keywords.This would save me from having to manually create folders like "linux" "wimax" "python".
.With a graphical 2D display, it should be possible to automatically create graphs with upper level keywords and then lower level branches to nodes with modifier keywords (such as "linux->kernel", "linux->databases", etc.
Plus, it might be nice to have a feature that creates an RSS feed of "candidate bookmarks" that you can evaluate, depending on how new webpages discovered by Googling for the same keywords as exist in your private bookmarks match.
[Meanwhile, I have an atrocious flat file list of bookmarks accumulated over 10 years that would be useless if it were not for the Search: feature in Firefox.]
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Take your pick.
What, me worry?
https://www.chipmark.com/Main
It's pretty cool... there's a plugin for firefox... take your bookmarks anywhere. Might be what you're looking for.
Powermarks is a tag-based (aka keyword-based) bookmark manager.
I love it.
When I'm browsing and find something I like, I press my hotkey and start typing one or more of the many keywords I use to describe URLs to myself. Saving a bookmark takes about 3 seconds, no mouse.
When I want to find a bookmark, I press another hotkey and start typing the domain name or a keyword. The search results are updated with every keystroke with no lag.
Works with Opera and Mozilla.
Have a look at http://www.thebrain.com/. It lets you organize your bookmarks and much more.
I'm not sure if this is what delicious does, but I'd like to add a book mark and automatically have that website added to my own private search engine/directory. The directory location would be default to some sane default - for instance, if I add a bookmark which is already in DMOZ, then it'd be added to the same directories as in DMOZ. If it didn't already exist in DMOZ, then I would have to place it somewhere myself, and this would be remembered for others unless I marked the bookmark private.
As for the search engine part, anything I add to my bookmarks file would be automatically crawled on a regular basis (subject to robots.txt rules I guess). I'd have a directory of any pages which changed in the last X days, and I'd have another directory of dead bookmarks.
This has been mentioned by a few other people, but I think it deserves more attention.
JUST USE GOOGLE. Chances are that's how you found the website in the first place anyway. Personally, I've only bookmarked websites that I visit every single day. For neato things, I just google for it if I want it again. This conveniently takes care of the problem of URLs changing with your bookmarks not being updated, as well.
That's a lot of porn!
Erm... speaking of porn, the industry has a lot of similar problems. There might be some porn derived tools for link storage, orginization and display that might be quickly adapted to more menial tasks.
Surprisingly useful. I use it a lot more that the traditional bookmarks.
I wrote a quick little PHP script that allows me to add/edit/delete bookmarks stored in a MySQL table.
It makes a nice little sidebar for Mozilla and FireFox. Regardless of being at home, work or dual booting to a different Mozilla/FireFox profile, my bookmarks are accessable.
Adding groups/subfolders is high on my wishlist.
Take a look at Scuttle, a run your own style del.icio.us. You can try it out at http://scuttle.org/.
Seriously all of these tagged systems are much better than a flat hierarchy when it comes to reusing bookmarks. Plus having it in your own database or an RSS feed is quite useful. Select a tagged rss feed and add it to your site to display recently related bookmarks, I dig it. Just the ability to share alone makes the system worthwhile. No more digging through email to find a link someone sent you last year.
The public/private/shared scheme is nice too, but I haven't used it much yet. All in all, great project.
"I have a cunning plan..."
I run Bookmarks Synchronizer. Works pretty well.
"Better to be vulgar than non-existent" -Bev Henson
the main thing is keeping a max size per folder. i've got 5 folders in root, and 3-8 folders in each of those, and 3-10 items/folders in each of those (and so on).
bookmar file raw and also in a javascript sidebar (mimicing firefox sidebar).
it expands organically. when a folder grows too large, it gets split into subclasses. follow your own naming conventions, or use dmoz for ideas.
some sites:
.
. hmmm
I think the poster is looking for sorting techniques. But for me my big problem was replication to all my desktops. So while the sorting is no better then folders/subfolders, I like: http://sitebar.org/
You may want to check out online bookmark services comparison chart. Most of them will import/export your bookmarks from all popular browsers.
my sstream of consciousness
SiteBar is the most powerful, and yet simple, bookmark manager out there. (I know because I started the project and handed it off to a brilliant programmer!)
It's a bookmark *server*, so you don't have to even be at your own computer to have all your bookmarks organized.
It runs in either your sidebar (beautiful in Firefox), main window, a stand-alone pop-up, your menu, an RSS feed, or embedded in any web page.
It's OSS, written in PHP/MySQL (port it if you'd like) so you can run your own server if you'd like
or use one of any number of public SiteBar servers which other people run.
It does link checking, expires old dead links, shows favicons in it's tree, has full users and groups if you want a multi-user setup, and fine granular control over editing/adding/deleting/viewing if you want to run it in your intranet.
You can simply import your current bookmark file (any format!), synch between installs, export to a different bookmark file, or use it from the server itself.
Check it out... let me know what you think mindslip.com>
http://simile.mit.edu/piggy-bank/index.html
"What can I do with this?
You can harvest and save useful metadata about the pages your browse directly from your browser and then browse and search it thru a built-in facetted browser.
Think of bookmarks on steroids."
SiteBar is the most powerful, and yet simple, bookmark manager out there. (I know because I started the project and handed it off to a brilliant programmer!)
:-)
Based on what you've said, you may well be right. What you described in your posting is something I've been thinking about for while; if someone else has developed it already, great!
However, before you get to carried away with your own magnificence, you might want to tell your 'brilliant programmer' friend to work on the website a bit.
From my visit to sitebar.org, I'd be hard pressed to tell you what Sitebar actually does. There's no FAQ or "What is Sitebar?" in the page contents list. The bulk of the home page is dedicated to telling me all about the wonderful new features in v3.3 and the availability of professional hosting, and the ability to get access to "Athena" and "Biju"'s bookmarks (whoever they are). The users documentation is apparently "coming soon".
The most detail I could find was the 2 line advertising-esque tagline under the main page title, and the "Main Features" sidebar (what a concept - Main features, reduced to a bullet list under the page index), which reduces the core description of sitebar to "Bookmark import/export".
The 5 line description that you have posted on Slashdot is a better description than anything I could find easily on the sitebar homepage. Based on what I found out from the webpage, there's no chance I'd be installing it. Based on the description from your post, it might be worth a try.
Oh - and as a side note - nothing makes me say "bullshit" faster than a product that declares itself to be the most powerful in the world. Ever notice how Google doesn't ever call itself the most powerful or best search engine in the world? It just is - and people recognise it as such. Self-granted accolates sound false, and are. Putting "we're the best" on the top of everything you do is a sure-fire way to come off looking like a professional wanker, hopelessly naive, or both.
Just a few helpful suggestions...
Russ %-)
... and never, ever play leapfrog with a unicorn.
Pros:
- Integrates nicely with the browser
- All bookmarks are kept in a single file that is easily transferred between PCs
- Keeps track of logins and and associated passwords. Not terribly secure but very convenient.
Cons:My opinion? See above.
I'd like to see a feature that will automatically consult an automatic database to get "kosherized" titles for web sites that I bookmark.
:o)
It would be awesome if I didn't have to change "XXX hot sluts ready for action XXX" into "Yahoo1", for example.
Yes, along with select cookies (preferences, etc.)
In the past, I've bookmarked articles and other sites that I thought were really interesting and that I occasionally referred other people to. Many of them no longer exist. Even Googling finds nothing. But I have a bookmark. I know where it used to be. And that means I can (often; not everything gets cached) use the Internet Archive to find that content again.
I must say, thank you for SiteBar! I've been using it for about 6 months - I'm hooked. (It's down right now as I switch hosts, but I'm putting it back up shortly)
SITEBAR ROCKS!
Works in Firefox, Opera, IE...
Web-based...accessible anywhere, from anything...
You can use it just for yourself, or make it open to the public (or in my case, family and friends can use it if they want, and contribute to the public folder of bookmarks in addition to their own personal folder)
Seriously...give it a look.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
just use google man! type in the words you recall from a page and presto.
--- widget evolution: enhanced, plus, super, ultra, extreme, exxxtreme, ultra-extreme,
I too have suffered bookmark overload; now I mostly use the Sage RSS reader for Firefox instead. Only visit pages as they're updated.
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"The first of many European imports consumed in New Zealand was a dead Dutchman" - James Belich
You can try mybookmarks.com. Once you sign up for an account, you can add bookmarks from the web interface, download an application to add bookmarks, and import and export bookmarks from your browser. But I don't really use it anymore because I ended up adding all my new bookmarks to Firefox without adding them to mybookmarks.com. Now the hierarchies get all messed up when I try to import my bookmarks.
I guess linkagogohttp://www.linkagogo.com/ can solve your problem.
Powermarks is fantastic -- great GUI interface, and it syncs to the web so you can use the same bookmarks database at home and at work.
.htm based on the old Netscape bookmarks file format. Lazyweb?
The big problem is that the online bookmark database is not web-accessible. It sits on Kaylon's servers. If someone could adapt Powermarks to sync to del.icio.us instead it would be perfect. I've suggested it to Kaylon but they're not really developing Powermarks anymore.
Shouldn't be too difficult as the Kaylon bookmarks database is a simple