This page is about techniques for managing your bookmarks. My Bookmarks managers page under Net software is about tools you can use to manage bookmarks: software and Web sites.
Whenever you find something interesting on the Web, you should bookmark it. However, if you just create bookmarks one after another with no attempt at organization, after a few months you will have dozens or hundreds, and it can be quite difficult to find anything.
The best way to avoid this situation is to form the habit of categorizing each bookmark as you create it, either by moving it into a topical folder, or by creating it within the folder to begin with.
Different browsers handle this a bit differently, but the big three—Firefox, Opera, and MSIE—all have ways to create bookmark folders and move bookmarks around among them.
These folders should relate to whatever subjects interest you, and be arranged in a way that makes sense to you. Don't worry too much about the names of new folders you create; you can rename them, create new folders, and rearrange things later, whenever the urge strikes you.
You can even create sub-folders within folders when that becomes appropriate, or move one existing folder inside another. Having hierarchical subject folders will also increase the usability of your browser's quick bookmarks menu (called "Bookmarks" in Firefox, Opera, and Netscape, and "Favorites" in MSIE). If you like, you can think of it as creating your own personal "mini-Yahoo."
Browsers usually install with a bunch of bookmarks already provided by the browser authors; feel free to delete them all, or just move the whole lot into a separate folder to get them out of the way.
Everyone who uses the Web has access to at least two kinds of bookmark management tools, and three if one has a personal Web site with links pages. Here's a suggestion for how to make use of them:
| Browser bookmarks features | Research in progress or not yet transferred to online bookmarks or your site links pages |
|---|---|
| Online bookmarks sites (e.g. mybookmarks.com) |
Resources you want available for your reference but not of general interest |
| Personal site links pages | Public bookmarks |
Obviously when you do Internet research away from your own PC (on someone else's PC or at places like public libraries and FedEx/Kinko's) any resulting bookmarks will have to go straight onto your online bookmarks site.
However you store your Internet bookmarks, you'll need to do a little bookmark gardening once in a whle, to keep them useful to you. This just means getting rid of stuff you're not interested in any more, making sure things are in the right folders, and maybe occasionally reorganizing your folder system a bit.
Watch out for bogus page titles. Each Web page typically has a set of "title" tags in the page header; the text inside these tags is normally displayed in the browser window's title bar, and it's also usually the link text for "hits" in search engines. When you bookmark a page, the label for the bookmark defaults to this title text.
Unfortunately, too many Web authors don't understand the importance of page titles. It's not uncommon to bookmark a page and notice that your new bookmark label reads "Page template" or something equally useless. Or sometimes a Website author will just use the same title for all pages in his site. What happens then? You might bookmark several different pages within a large site, and then be disgusted to find they all have the same label.
When you encounter a case like this, you can just open the Properties dialog for each offending bookmark, make sure the Name text is selected, and type in the short, meaningful title that the author should have provided in the first place. You may even find that you want to do this to some extent with pages that do have meaningful titles, especially sites' home pages. Too many corporate home pages generate bookmarks that include useless extra text, such as ...
Whizbang Corp. Home Page
Official Home Page of Whizbang Corp.
Welcome to the Official Home Page of Whizbang Corp.
Welcome to Whizbang Corp.--[long list of every product they make]
After you see deadwood like that a few dozen times, you may start going in and "pruning" some of it, in your personal bookmark collection.
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