If your browser's list of bookmarks has become so long that you can only see the bottom entries by scrolling down, it may be time for some housekeeping.
Still, once dozens or even hundreds of links have piled up, getting them back in order can be an arduous task. It may be time for a different approach such as ongoing maintenance of your favourites. Several tools can help with this task.
One of them is the browser's own bookmark manager. On Internet Explorer 7, this amounts merely to a fairly stripped-down tool that allows bookmarks to be saved and sorted into various folders. That's enough for many users, but other browsers offer more. Opera (http://www.opera.com) offers a quick selection window that pulls up your most frequently visited pages. The bookmarks can also be given nicknames; these can later be entered into the address bar to call up the link quickly. Mozilla's Firefox also offers a synchronisation function. This comes in the form of an add-on called "Foxmarks," available for download at http://addons.mozilla.org. A different extension called "Scrapbook" can even copy entire web sites onto the hard drive - including linked content, if desired. Text passages can then be marked on the pages. "Scrapbook" works with both Firefox 2 and 3.
Another Firefox feature offers a cunning solution as well and allows keywords or tags to be attached to the bookmarks. This makes it easier to find individual bookmarks or entire groups when working with large collections. Links can be stored on the fly by simply clicking on the star in the address bar. The link is then saved to the unsorted bookmarks folder. Tidier users click twice and then drag the link directly into the desired folder.
Favourites are added in both Firefox and Opera using the Ctrl and D keys, among other methods. Within Internet Explorer a click on the Favourites button leads to the Save Favourite feature.
Dynamic bookmarks are another Firefox novelty. They keep track of the availability of new content on each site. Those who view many pages, particularly those who want to archive selected links, may well be better served with a feedreader. One such, free programme is available at http://www.feedreader.com.
If you want more independence from your browser, you can store and administer your favourites using social bookmarking sites such as delicious.com or linkarena.com. To do so, you must first create a profile on the site. You can then save links to your profile using the browser. The bookmark collection can be kept private, authorised for certain friends only, or be made visible to all other users.
Delicious and Linkarena offer tools to make it easier to store favourites. These eliminate the need to call up the social bookmarking site itself. If you're willing to keep your link collection outside your computer, you gain one big advantage with these sites: access to your bookmarks from any internet-connected computer. You can also point other users toward interesting links.
Cleaning up your bookmarks can help revive some of the fun of surfing. One helpful and free tool is AM Deadlink (http://www.aignes.com/de/deadlink.htm). It searches for dead or duplicate links in Firefox, Opera, and Internet Explorer. And what should you do if the tool identifies a link as dead, meaning the site no longer exists? You can try to find a copy of the site in the Wayback Machine at http://www.archive.org. The site is a fun collection of older versions of many sites no longer on the web.
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