Bookmarks don’t need to be limited to a menu in your web browser. Petra Jones suggests 17 smart ways to store, share and synchronise your favourite sites
Synchronise bookmarks between devices
Opera Link (www.opera.com/link) offers a useful means of synchronizing your favourite sites on Opera between your laptop and mobile phone. However, if you’re on a pay-as-you-go package, you might not want to waste time and money downloading the necessary Opera Mini web browser. An alternative is to sign up to Memotoo (www.memotoo.com), which doesn’t require any software. Just add your bookmarks to the site and then visit http://wap.memotoo.com on your phone to access them or create new entries. Memotoo is also capable of storing calendar events and to-do lists, although the free version is limited to 100 bookmarks and 10 folders. The unlimited Premium version costs £3 per month.
Share bookmarks via text
Sign up to Yahoo and you can access both RSS feeds and bookmarks on your mobile phone by visiting http://mobile.yahoo.com. You can also share bookmarks via Yahoo Messenger by sending a text message from your PC to a friend’s phone (Yahoo’s service is free, but you should check first that the person won’t be charged for receiving the text via their network). Another option is Mobiseer (www.mobiseer.com), which allows you to organise and create bookmarks on your mobile and offers space-saving filtered views of your favourite sites. You can also create groups to share your bookmarks with other mobile phone users.
Synchronise bookmarks between browsers
Tidy Favourites (www.tidyfavorites.com) lets you view the same list of bookmarks in a whole variety of web browsers, which is extremely handy if you use multiple browsers or on those occasions when you’re working away from home. The program is compatible with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Flock and Opera browsers and offers options to display your most frequently accessed bookmarks and website thumbnails. Tidy Favourites has one drawback: it’s limited to Windows, so Mac users should consider using BookmarkSync (www.bookmarksync.com) instead. This is compatible with Safari, Opera, IE and Firefox and is particularly adept at finding and deleting any dead and duplicate links among your bookmarks.
Get alerts about site updates
Fed up with visiting your favourite websites to check whether they’ve been updated? Sign up to Notify.me (www.notify.me) to receive alerts via text message or instant messenger whenever new content is added to your bookmarks. Notify.me is free and comes with a bookmarklet button for IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari browsers so you can select sites to monitor for changes with a single click. You can also add ‘filters’ or keywords relating to specific types of update, which is useful for monitoring news websites.
Sort and filter your bookmarks
Sign up with free online service Bookmax.net (www.bookmax.net) and then drag and drop the two links provided onto the bookmarks toolbar of your browser. You can then sort your bookmarks by ‘last used’, ‘last added’ or ‘most frequently used’, with the added bonus of a Search box to help you find bookmarks faster. Another way to organise your bookmarks is to use Speedtile (www.speedtile.net). This lets you drag and drop thumbnails of bookmarks to reorder them, filter your collection of Favorites by tag or category and share your saved sites with friends by emailing them a unique web address. Speedtile’s handy web service can be used on any browser.
Publish your bookmarks online
You can share your bookmarks on your website or blog using Xmarks (www.xmarks.com), a browser plug-in for IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari that works with Windows, Mac and Linux. Xmarks will automatically import your current Favourites and display them in an expandable tree of folders. From here, you can publish your bookmarks to a web page, or turn them into an RSS feed that your friends can subscribe to. Another option for publishing your bookmarks online is Toobla (www.toobla.com). This lets you gather together multiple bookmarks in folders that can then be shared with friends on social networks, including Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. Toobla also lets you import existing bookmarks from Delicious, Digg and YouTube accounts and share them using a menu at the bottom of your browser.
View bookmarks offline
If you don’t always get time to view interesting web pages as you find them, try Read It Later (www.readitlaterlist.com). Register with the site and drag and drop three bookmarklet links to your browser – select ‘Read It Later’ to save a bookmark offline to read later,
‘Mark as Read’ to remove it from your list, or ‘Reading List’ to view all your offline bookmarks. Read It Later lets you sort your offline bookmarks by pages within a site, alphabetically, or by newest/oldest. You can also filter them by any part of the title, site name or tag.
You can read bookmarks offline on your mobile phone using LaterLoop (www.laterloop.com), which is accessed by visiting http://m.laterloop.com. However, your offline bookmarks will need to have been saved through your browser on your desktop PC.
Scan for broken bookmarks
If you use Internet Explorer or Opera, there’s a free tool called AM-DeadLink (www.aignes.com/deadlink.htm) that will detect and remove broken and duplicate links from your Favourites. Use the green tick icon under Options to scan all or selected bookmarks, and then back up your collection. For Firefox users, there’s an add-on called CheckPlaces (http://bit.ly/check232) that performs a similar clean-up job.
Expand your bookmarks
The free social-bookmarking service Delicious (www.delicious.com) provides links to the profiles and bookmarks of other people who have bookmarked the same sites as you. This helps you find like-minded web users to connect with and get ideas for new bookmarks by browsing their collections. There’s also a Firefox add-on (http://bit.ly/del232) that suggests related bookmarks based on the tags people apply to sites in Delicious.
Source of Information : WebUser January 28 2010
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