Automatic Bookmark Organizer

December 7, 2004 10:12 AM

I have 300+ bookmarks in my web-browser which are either organised badly or not at all. Instead of spending hours re-categorising them manually, is there anything automatic that can help? (Browser of choice is Firefox, but happy to covert back and forth to IE's favourites format if necessary)
posted by ralawrence to Computers & Internet (13 answers total)

If you're willing to at least set up the categories that you want to organize them into, Spurl.net will allow you to import your bookmarks from Firefox. Then you can go through the list on their website and do mass categorization (select all your "baseball" bookmarks from the list and move them into the baseball category you've already set up). When you're done, you can export them to a file you can reimport into Firefox.
posted by hootch at 10:49 AM on December 7, 2004

My advice is to stop bookmarking things. Instead, simply remember the URLs, or else Google.
posted by kindall at 10:57 AM on December 7, 2004

I don't bookmark at all anymore. I use del.icio.us, and then have my page be my startup page in all of my browsers at all of my locations. Easier to keep track of, IMHO.
posted by terrapin at 11:10 AM on December 7, 2004

You are using the Firefox "Manage Bookmarks..." screen, right? It doesn't seem that bad for organizing even 300 bookmarks.

Really, how would you categorize automatically? Using Yahoo or something to get the category for the bookmark?
posted by smackfu at 11:11 AM on December 7, 2004

Really, how would you categorize automatically? Using Yahoo or something to get the category for the bookmark?

Seconded. You don't seriously expect a computer program to be able to figure out how YOU personally would categorize a bookmark, do you? I don't mean to sound snarky, but that's essentially asking a computer to read your mind.

Given the problem of organizing bookmarks, there really is no other way than to sit down and go over them yourself; if you do it in a few sessions over a fairly short period, you will be able to remember enough of the categories or possible categories that you'll be able to organize fairly well when looking at each bookmark.

I do this periodically and just last night finished moving my stuff over to del.icio.us, a la terrapin's comment. Now it's even easier to organize stuff because I don't have to decide if a bookmark belongs in two similar folders--I just tag it with both tags.
posted by cyrusdogstar at 11:21 AM on December 7, 2004

A third vote for del.icio.us. It's not automatic, but very much worth it.
posted by muckster at 11:24 AM on December 7, 2004

Building from cyrus' suggestion. You could create some high level categories (say Technology, Games, Reference) move what you can into those, then refine those categories and organize. ie, under Tech have Linux, Web, Whitepapers. Continue until happy. Essentially break the task into smaller parts and tackle those.
posted by MikeKD at 11:52 AM on December 7, 2004

You don't seriously expect a computer program to be able to figure out how YOU personally would categorize a bookmark, do you?

The "YOU personally" part I buy. But you could get a rough cut by using one of the APIs to del.icio.us to retrieve tags OTHER people had asigned to your links, then generate folders from those.

You'd miss anything that wasn't tagged on del.icio.us of course, and you'd probably get some conflicts - but it would be fun to make, who cares if it actually workd, right?
posted by freebird at 1:26 PM on December 7, 2004

That's actually very clever. I don't think the API to do it is there yet, but it will already tell you the most popular tag for one of your links, for instance (on the right).

It does a good job on most of my links. Maybe they should add auto-tagging to the site.
posted by smackfu at 8:14 PM on December 7, 2004

My advice is to stop bookmarking things. Instead, simply remember the URLs, or else Google.

Hey kindall, either you're lying or you have enough IQ to share. For my sake I hope the latter.
posted by davy at 9:26 PM on December 7, 2004

Well, if I liked a given URL enough to blog it, Google will find it, and if it's a URL I use frequently, it's in my history and autocomplete will fill it out for me when I start typing it. If your browser autocompletes based on the name of the page as well as the URL, it works quite well. (OmniWeb!) As a last resort, if I want to go back to "that cool site I saw Monday" I'll just go to Monday's history and look through it. I'll think "Oh, I was looking at that after I visited MetaFilter in the morning" so I'll find MetaFilter and then look at sites I visited afterward.

I do bookmark a few things for later bloggage but I'll probably switch over to del.icio.us for that.
posted by kindall at 10:00 PM on December 7, 2004

I've added a linklog to my blog which is divided into categories where I store bookmarks that I probably won't visit all that often, but want to keep anyway. It works great for me as both a backup and a really easy way to maintain my bookmarks. Places I visit regularly stay in my Firefox bookmarks, with "daily visits" on the toolbar. Plus I keep a folder for stuff I find and don't have time to look at right then/might want to keep or blog/etc.
posted by eatcherry at 5:55 AM on December 8, 2004

I've found that the combination of del.icio.us and Firefox's "Live Bookmarks" feature is fantastic. All my regular links are in a couple of tags that I put in my bookmarks toolbar. The result is that I only have two bookmarks in my menu; one to post to del.icio.us, and one to pull up my page.

It's certainly saved me from my old gargantuan bookmarks menu, while making it easier for me to bookmark *more* and still be able to find that one thing I saw on the internets ages ago.

If you check the del.icio.us blog as well as the docs Joshua has linked to a few bookmark importer thingeys and other miscellaneous posting utilities that may be useful.
posted by AaronRaphael at 12:45 PM on December 8, 2004