As you can imagine, someone like myself who wastes spends countless hours overloading educating oneself with the myriad of information and websites across the internet bookmarks quite a few things. On average, in a week, I’d estimate if I had already figured out bookmark organization completely, I’d bookmark between 10 and 30 things a week. That’s approximately 1 to 4 things a day - and that’s based on a conservative guess. I recently had one of my friends ask me, “How do you handle the volume of bookmarks that can accumulate over time?” and simply put, I responded, “I don’t…yet.” Organizing bookmarks (400 uncatagorized prior to this week’s exercise) is one of those things like organizing your music library - when you’ve got 30,000+ songs to tag and sort or like another problem I have; 400+ DVD’s I want to catalog into Libra (Free) or Collectorz.com’s Movie Collector (NOT Free) - it’s a daunting task… Finally, I decided to at least tackle one of my organizational problems - bookmarks!
There are more bookmark management services out there than you can shake a stick at: Del.icio.us, Reddit, Digg, BlinkPro and of course Firefox and IE’s built-in systems. There are those that will argue Reddit and Digg aren’t primarily for bookmark management and I’ll agree; thus why I didn’t end up using them ultimately, however, they offer very similar functionality to bookmark management services and as such I know several people who used them as their current web bookmarkers…yes…we’re making up words now. This, in my mind, really only leaves me with 3 quality options.
IE’s current system drives me nuts - it’s very limited in it’s capabilities and although I’ve heard IE8 will be bringing a ton of new features to the bookmarking platform, I’ve not gone the route of testing the currently available IE8 Beta 1. Perhaps it’s merely due to the lack of syncing (addressed via an addon for FF) or that I just prefer not to use Internet Explorer… No tagging; just standard heirarchal folder structures with no extensibility or sharing.
Regarding FF2; I have the same issues as I did with IE. For the past several years though, I’ve been a loyal FF user, only using IE only for web development and testing purposes. So naturally, it made the most sense to put them in FF! Firefox’s saving grace for me was Foxmarks. This little add-on is fantastic! The short version - it syncs your Firefox bookmarks to their server and across any number of PC’s you have the plug-in installed on. It addresses one of my major gripes and syncs my bookmarks across all 4 of my machines! Even with Foxmarks, FF2 is still somewhat lacking though as it’s hard to sort or search them because of a lack of tagging or easily accessible search feature. Yes, I know if I go to “Organize Bookmarks” and the Bookmark Library that I can search there - but that’s too much work…call me lazy… Firefox 3 Beta 5 addresses some issues by adding Tags and “Smart Bookmarks” but I still wanted to be able to access them from any browser on any machine; even those without my beloved Foxmarks installed.
Next brings me to Del.icio.us. As everyone knows, they’ve been around for a few years now and offer a relatively simple service. The idea behind their system is similar to GMail - rather than organizing everything into folders, they organize via a system called tagging. Now, I’ve mentioned tagging above, but if you are unfamiliar, tagging is merely applying descriptive words to an item. Tagging this blog might result in “entrepreneur, blog, technology, marcus bearden.” Each tag is seperated by a comma and each word describes the blog and it’s content. They also offer the ability to share bookmarks with the community at large; something I really don’t see myself taking huge advantage of - but hey - it’s there if I want it…
Well - this week I began organizing all of my bookmarks into folders and preparring them for the Import to Del.icio.us… Since I’m going for the full immersion treatment in my bookmark management practices; I needed to not only migrate my bookmarks over to Del.icio.us but I always wanted to replace my browser’s bookmark functionality with one that tied directly into Del.icio.us so I didn’t have to login to my account everytime I wanted to add a bookmark… So, I installed the latest add-on for Del.icio.us for Firefox Beta 3. I found information on the current beta over at DailyGyan and it contains the information you need to locate and install the plug-in for the latest version of Firefox 3 Beta 5 or you can just go to Firefox’s own extension site and install it there if you’re still running Firefox 2. The add-on also adds a Del.icio.us sidebar so you can view all your tags and bookmarks from within your browser without having to open another web page just for your bookmarks. A few quick notes; when importing to Del.icio.us, it will tag your existing bookmarks for you based on the folders the bookmarks are located in. So if it’s located in the “Web Design -> Blogging -> SEO” folder in your browser, it’ll be tagged with “blogging, webdesign, seo” and any spaces will be removed since Del.icio.us doesn’t accept spaces.
Yes, I know I’m a bit behind the game in migrating to something like this but as I mentioned above; it was just one of those painful things I avoided for as long as possible. Now my bookmarks are neatly tagged and organized. I’ll report back later to see what my thoughts are after using it for awhile. In the meantime, check out what few shared bookmarks I have setup so far over at my Del.icio.us page…
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