On the recent discussion about browsers on Palimpsest, talk turned eventually to bookmarks, as one member had recently had a problem with Firefox deleting them all. Not sure how that happened, but it is a useful reminder that in Firefox you can back up your bookmarks by saving them to a HTML file. This is doubly useful, for not only can you load them back in in the event of a disaster, but you can also lob them online and be able to access them if you use a different computer.
That, of course, is if you use bookmarks at all. Which I don’t. I think I might have done when I first started using the web in 1997, when they were part of the fun of using Netscape for the first time. But now? Never. It came as a real surprise to me that anyone still uses them, but apparently they do.
So what do I do? I rely on the keyboard – either by using my own browser’s history to autocomplete URLs for me, or by using Google. It’s just quicker, as far as I am concerned. I don’t even bother with the links on the left hand side of this site. When I set up my Google portal, I put in a few links, but never click on them. I do click on the links for the sites with RSS feeds, though, so maybe that says something.
I have tried some of the various bookmarking sites, like del.icio.us and My Furl page is linked to from this site, but everytime I start to use it, I just get bored. Sites I want to share with people I link to from here. Filling in countless fields for every site I find interesting just isn’t something I want to do! And is there an option on Furl to display a simple list of all the sites I have bookmarked? That might be interesting. But the main view is just too damn complicated for my liking. If there was an option to click a toolbar button and the site was recorded, with no other interaction required, then that might be useful too, it would become second nature to Furl sites and maybe have a look through once a week to see if there are any gems there. But it’s all just too time consuming at the moment.
Update: Having said all this, though, I am going to experiment for the next couple of days of using both Furl and del.icio.us to log the things I look at. Links are over in the sidebar, under ‘Me’. Let’s see which is best and whether I can actually be bothered with either.