Managing Bookmarks

2012-01-01

How do you organize the things online that you refer to frequently, or want to get back to later? If you’ve got a system that works for you, I want to hear about it!

There are two tiers of general solutions, both integrated into web browsers: bookmarks/favourites for resources we just want to be able to randomly access later, and the reading list, with first-class support in Safari, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge, extensions for Chrome, etc. Of the two, I just don’t use the reading list. Once you learn about reddit, content aggregates too fast for you to ever have a hope of pouring over everything you want to. So instead of building a queue that will always grow faster than I can whittle it down, I build upon my bookmarks endlessly, knowing that eventually I’ll want to re-examine some known interests of mine, and accepting the regrettable fact that some will sit, untouched indefinitely.

With that out of the way, I want a bookmark system that can manageable grow into the hundreds of items (780 and counting in my case), where things remain easy to find and quick to access. My solution, which works for me and I recommend to you, is very simple: fill your bookmark toolbar with icons, not text, with a lot of top-level folders that cover most of the essentials of life. Here’s mine:

When you create a bookmark, it includes the “favicon” that most decent sites will generally provide, and then includes the title from the page. I simply edit out the text part, since I know all these icons - things like my calendar, Facebook, reddit, Netflix, YouTube, Wunderlist, OneNote, Mint - things I refer to frequently that I want one click away.

When you create a folder, you can’t customize the icons - but you can use non-standard characters in the text label, and emoticons and other unusual characters are receiving more and more support all the time. My categories are as follows:

Camera - photography

Cog - Development tools

Man with barbell - Fitness and nutrition

Pencil - educational literature

Chess knight - games and entertainment

Dollar sign - Banks, stocks, financial planning tools

Eighth note - music resources

Heart - dating sites / profiles of interest

Airplane - travel ideas and aspirations

Hammer and sickle - work-related resources

Mountain - camping and survival skills

Shopping bags - wish-list items I’m thinking about purchasing

Checked box - effectively like my reading list - things I actually mean to deal with

Dancing man - dance moves/tutorials

Football - resources for a programming project I’m currently working on

Where can you find symbols like this? I’ve been using the following website: http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/search.htm. Just copy and paste the icons from the website to your bookmark names!

Split into two lines for easy viewing here - usually all on one