Managing bookmarks

Friday, January 15th, 2010 | Author:

Today in the series "How to do XYZ with software?":

How to manage bookmarks?

Probably you've once had the moment in your life when you installed some new browser, re-installed you computer or something like that - and all your browser bookmarks were lost. How to do better?


After this bookmarks-lost-accident had happened once to me, in the Netscape days, I decided to never use browser bookmarking systems again. For quite some time, I managed my bookmarks in a text file that I had put on my website (secret URL, of course).


Since about 2002, there is del.icio.us bookmarks, a Web 2.0 bookmarking system, so you can access your bookmarks from anywhere at any time with any browser. I'm using it for a long time, sometimes more, sometimes less, and it has satisfied me since I started using it. You can just save links, but you can also attach a description and tags to your links, to let your future-you understand what it is.

(comic licensed from Randall Munroe under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License)

It's even better if some of your friends use it, too: you can "send" them bookmarks so they appear at a special place in their Delicious accounts. This is much less work-interrupting than an ICQ/Skype instant message or an email. And it's more private than a tweet.

Delicious supports public bookmarks (which is good, since you can search other peoples findings) and private bookmarks (which is good, well, because you don't want everyone to know everything about you, right?).

I'm using the Firefox add-on for Delicious, too. It works well and doesn't disturb my work. It synchronises with delicious, so you don't need an open internet connection to search through your bookmarks (so it's very fast).

There are other similar systems (I don't know the names), which might satisfy you, too. Take a look at them, maybe they're better than Delicious. But Delicious is good enough for me :-)


Category: English, Not Mathematics

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