Aerumnous.com

Web browsing is both a hobby and a need. I don’t know where I would be if I didn’t have google!

But the fact is that over time, as you google more and more, you will fall foul of having too many bookmarks to manage easilly.

Yes, you can start organised and add your bookmarks into nice folders and then you ’should’ be able to find them again (assuming your folder is a good obvious name).

But even this approach gets difficult as the number of bookmarks increase:

Issue 1: Lots of Screen space needed to see the bookmark folders – When you start having sub folders of bookmarks many clicks to navigate many levels of folders.

Issue 2: Bookmarks that fit into many categories (i.e. folders) – I find that one bookmark will get stored in one folder, and yet another may get stored in a different named folder – causing me to fragment my bookmarks!

Issue 3: Searching is broken: I use Firefox and safari alot and I find that the search feature in the firefox sidebar doesnt search! Maybe it only searching by title and not tag?

Issue 4: I want the same bookmarks on all my machines (whether its firefox or safari)

Issue 5: I don’t want the world to see my bookmarks.

I have had the above issues for many years, and I have tried many approaches…. I think I have finally cracked it – well mostly ;-(

My latest solution: Delicious + Xmarks addons

Xmarks:

I will start with issue 4 and 5 – yes, wrong order, but hey, its my post

There is a addon for both Safari and Firefox called ‘Xmarks’ (formerly foxmarks) which will synchronise your bookmarks to their website (keeping them private) and keep multiple browsers/machines in sync. So when you add or modify a bookmark, it will get synced to the remote server and then synced back to the other machines/browser.

All for free! Heres the link to the site: http://www.xmarks.com/

Downsides to Xmarks:

- Each browser decides to add additional bookmarks for ‘most visited’ into your own bookmarks – try as I mite, you cannot delete these (Xmarks will sync them to server). These then get put into the other browser. So firefox most visited appears in Safari – and then the bookmark doesnt work!

Delicious (formerly del.ico.us)

Delicious is and has been all the rage in ’social bookmarking’ for a while now. Of course if you dont have any privacy and you like to look at pages that your mates (or even any other net surfer) has been too, then delicious is for you. Of course, issue 5 (private bookmarks) is what i want.

But I have found that you can go into the settings options on the delicious site and make your bookmarks private.

The great thing about delicious is the concept of ‘tagging’. Every bookmark you create can be tagged with keywords (same as firefox can). Then no matter where you store the bookmakr folder wise, you can find it by searching by the tag.

‘Tag groups’

But the best part is that Delicious goes alittle further, you can create tag groups which encompass any number of other tags. This fixes my issue 2.

‘Delicuous sidebar’

Issue 3 is fixed by using the Delicous sidebar addon for firefox here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3615

which basically allows you to see and navigate your delicous bookmarks in the Firefox browser.

You can also search by bookmakr name and/or tag easilly by typing search words in the sidebar.

Delicous and firefox bookmarks work together

I have found that neither Firefox bookmarking by folders or Delicious bookmarking by tags fixes all the issue on their own.

But if you use both, you can get the best of both worlds. To do this, you simply need to remember to add you bookmarks to delicious at the time of adding them to firefox.

Its easy to do this by clicking yes to ‘add to delicous’ when you press ‘add bookmark’.

And here’s a screenshot with Delicious and xmarks working in firefox 3:

Delicous sidebar v2 working along side Xmarks and Firefox bookmarks

Tweet This Post Digg This Post Stumble This Post