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'?"

Comments

might want to give del.ico.us another shot

[rebug]

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.

BBPS (GPLed, PHP & MySQL)

[edmz]

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)

A feature I'd like to see

[c0d3h4x0r]

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.

Re:A feature I'd like to see

[mattbrundage]

Perhaps what we need is a new meta tag to handle this bookmark title:

<meta name="bmtitle" content="Mozilla.org" />

This fits much better in my bookmarks than the current title "Mozilla - Home of the Firefox web browser and Thunderbird e-mail client".

I want

[dJCL]

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...

Re:I want

[ogre57]

Parent: Look at Firefox Extensions >> Bookmarks, maybe try eg Bookmarks Synchronizer 1.0.1, etc.

Article: Wish list item. Over the years I've accumulated bookmark files from Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox, Opera, Safari, Konqueror, and Lynx. I would like something that would reconcile these various files and formats into a single file, ask/delete duplicates, etc. These duplicates would include "Hey dummy, you have the same url in 3 different folders. Do you want to delete ..". Mentioned elsewhere, also some easy way to scan, verify, find, and ask/delete dead links.

What about Favicons?

[tommertron]

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

Too many bookmarks

[digitect]

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:

1. Try not to bookmark links.
2. If you must, keep them in one of 15-20 categories.
3. Never have more than 50-60 total. Refactor constantly.

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.