Dear Aunt TUAW: Help me tame my bookmarks
Dear Aunt TUAW,
Help me Auntie! I've got a zillion--maybe 3 or 4 less--bookmarks. I want to validate the good ones and discard the bad. Is there an app for that?
I mean automatically do this and then give me options for saving the good/tossing the bad and perhaps even seeing if the root domain is still active?
Thanks for helping a nephew out!
Love,
Leo
Dear Leo,
Bookmarks. They accumulate like lint on Uncle Mikey's chin on Sundays after his tenth beer and third football game. I truly feel your pain. Fortunately, a little scrounging and a few nice hot cups of tea shared by the extended TUAW family may have unearthed a few solutions for you.
You don't mention in your e-mail which browser you are using, so let Auntie point you to solutions for both Safari and Firefox.
On the Safari side, Uncle Chris White tracked down Balooba software's Safari Prariefire, which scans for dead, missing, and duplicate links. It's shareware and costs US$6. Currently all registration fees are being donated to the Red Cross in support of the Japanese earthquake victims.
There's also a trial version for getting a feel for the software prior to purchase as well as a "free" version if you're willing to go through TrialPay, a service that frankly makes Auntie uncomfortable -- it's a creepy "sign up for stuff" option that doesn't seem entirely above board.
On the Firefox side, there's CheckPlaces. CheckPlaces is donationware which adds the same kind of checks for valid pages and duplicates as Prariefire plus empty-folder and favicon completion options. CheckPlaces will also "compact and check the integrity" of your Places database.
Between these two, you should be covered -- unless you're using one of those newfangled longhair browsers like Chrome, Opera, or Lynx.
Auntie sends her love. Don't forget to brush and floss -- good dental hygiene is a gift!
Kissies,
Auntie T.
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Dear Aunt TUAW, Help me Auntie! I've got a zillion--maybe 3 or 4 less--bookmarks. I want to validate the good ones and discard the...
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Have been a Bookdog user for a long time, but now, using Chrome there's an easy way to do that maintenance. I use 3 extensions:
SuperSorter, which alphabetically sorts all bookmarks including subfolders with 1 click,
BookmarkSentry, which checks for duplicates and bad links (if you want to automatically in the background every few days or so), and
Xmarks, for synchronizing automatically to Safari.
Thanks for the final piece. I use Delicious for websites that I wanna bookmark for my own personal blackbook and I use readitlater for articles that I wanna wanna read later. LOL
The missing piece was my old bookmarks that total over 2 thousand and are still on my PC. The suggested software will help me clear through them and get them in the cloud.
Depending on delicious future I might import them into webnote or webbla.
I bookmark tons of links weekly, mainly science related that are inherent hard to find by simply googling. These bookmarks utilities are golden. I use both Safari Prairiefire and Checkplaces and couldn't live without them.
I don't like having the same bookmarks library for Safari and FireFox since I mainly use FF for sites that for one reason or the other doesn't behave right in Safari.
BTW, I used TrialPay once to pay for some app, mainly because I was curious, and it seemed legit. At least I haven't been spammed or scammed yet :) But I'm not sure if I'd bother unless there's something I really want to "sign up for".
I stopped organizing my bookmarks a couple of years ago. Now I just bookmark pages, but when I want to go to one, I just use HistoryHound to do a quick search and pull out the one I want.
Disclaimer: I wrote HistoryHound - partly because I got tired of wasting my time organizing bookmarks :)
- Jon
Whoops - the URL didn't make it in my original comment - http://www.stclairsoft.com/HistoryHound/
April 01 2011 at 10:26 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Replycheck out bookmacster. it manages bookmarks from all your sources at once. i've been using it for years and while it takes a little bit to understand and get set up properly it is magic once it is.
http://www.sheepsystems.com/products/bkmx/
I second the vote for BookMacster. I just started using it last week (I got it in a Mac utility bundle from TheMacBundles (http://themacbundles.com/), and it works great. Does exports to Chrome, Safari, Firefox & Opera, and does bookmark verification as well. I like it a lot (except for its ugly icon!). It is offered by Sheep Systems, and is the "replacement" for Bookdog (also recommended in the first comment here) for Macs running 10.5.x and above...
Dear Aunt TUAW,
I am a T-Mobile cell phone subscriber (with no contract) that currently uses an iPhone 3GS as a cell phone. If the AT&T/T-Mobile merger were to be approved, would I need to get a new plan with AT&T or may I continue using my current plan with an iPhone that no longer needs to be jail-broken to work on the network?
In other words, how will the merger affect current T-Mobile subscribers with jail-broken iPhones as their smartphone?
Best,
David
What's a bookmark?
Seriously. With Google and such being fast and reliable, I rarely bookmark anything any more. I have 20-odd sites I visit regularly, and I have those as icons up there in my FF Bookmarks Toolbar. But anything other than those? I can use a search to find it again.
It not only became a bother to 'manage' bookmarks, I found I rarely went back to a bookmark for a link (I would just re-search). Plus, half the time I would go to a bookmark to find the page gone or moved, so now my bookmarks list is fill of dead leaves.
Mark your most frequented, and just forget the rest....
I'm confused. If you don't use a bookmark frequently enough to know if it's valid or not, why do you even have the bookmark?
I guess pack rats exist in digital form too.
Saving it for later so I don't forget. Like equipment to buy when my company has the money. Or articles that I refer people to every few months.
March 31 2011 at 4:30 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyWhile this doesn't solve the problem of trimming down old bookmarks, it does help them from getting out of hand. I only "bookmark" sites I know I will revisit to some level of frequency. I use SpeedDial in Firefox (and Top Sites in Safari) for my most visited sites (TUAW, Engadget, Facebook, etc.), and anything else that I will revisit often gets a bookmark.
For all those little things that I know that I need to save the URL for, but will only access once or twice again, I save them using Read It Later (with the Firefox extension), these are easy to clean out once I've used them the one or two times I need to revisit them.
I do the same thing using Webnote from http://happyapps.com/webnote/
I have used for 4+ years and find it very useful with its ability to tag websites.
Check out SiteBar (www.sitebar.org) - runs in any browser, and is server base so it's accessible from any of your devices.
It does link checking and full enterprise-grade Access controls (though that may be a bit beyobd your needs).
Best of all - it's free (open source)!
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TUAW (or The Unofficial Apple Weblog) is a website devoted to tips, reviews, news, analysis and opinion on everything Apple.
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