Cleaning out your Browser Bookmarks

Jessica — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 22:12:00 -0600

I don’t sync my browser bookmarks with my del.icio.us bookmarks. The possibility that some of my browser bookmarks might become public is enough to keep me from setting up a way to keep everything organized. In general, my bookmarking strategy is this:

Browser bookmarks are for frequently used sites
Del.icio.us bookmarks are for articles and posts that are interesting or helpful, or require further attention (finish reading, further research on subject etc.)

This strategy makes it easier to go through bookmarks that end up in my browser “Favorites”. If the site doesn’t fit into either of these categories, it is deleted.

5 tips for Weeding out your Browser Bookmarks

If you are using firefox or safari or another browser that has tabbed browsing, make sure to use the open in tabs feature. Not familiar with this feature? You can view all of the sites in a folder without double clicking all of the links in that folder. Just right click on the folder in your bookmarks sidebar, and select “Open in Tabs”.
Match your bookmark organization with your file system organization. For instance, if your My Documents folder has three sub-folders (school, work, media), then your browser bookmark folders should also atleast have school, work and media folders.
Unsure about whether to delete some set of bookmarks? Write a post on your blog about them. I was unsure about whether or not to delete some links to scholarship sites that I had been saving. So, I wrote a short post about those scholarship opportunities and posted them here. Now, not only do I still have access to those links, I have passed on some information that someone else might find useful.
Still unsure about whether or not to delete a bookmark? Don’t delete it. Maintain a large “Reference” folder; this is where most of your bookmarks should be. The links in the Reference folder are what you are going to look through when you are trying to find that awesome site you used three years ago to create a presentation that you have been asked to give again.
Create action folders. I use to.buy, to.blog, to.read, to.try and email. I like these folders because I can quickly put links here and not worry if they stay there for a while or if I forget about them.

a.muse: Cleaning out your Browser Bookmarks

Cleaning out your Browser Bookmarks