Another personal system I developed over time to simplify my digital life.
For years, I had a tendency to use the favorite or bookmark functions in web browsers as a dump for all sorts of links I would end up never visiting again.
I ended up organizing bookmarks into categories:
- Shortcuts to frequently used forums and social media sites – for these, I use the favorites toolbar present in most folders and edit out the name of the bookmark, leaving only the icon of that site.
- Bookmarklets to send a quick post to blogs – I group these into a ‘Post to..’ folder in the favorites toolbar for quick access
- Links to videos to watch later – I save those into a ‘Watchlist’ folder, also in the favorite toolbar
- Shortcuts to personal sites, accounts, profiles – these go into folders, also in the favorite toolbar, and named after a handful of high level categories like ‘Home’, ‘Finance’, ‘Create’, ‘Play’, ‘Work’
- Reference links – for links to pages I want to be able to search later, I use Diigo and tags to organize the links. I started with Delicious and eventually dropped it when it was almost discontinued by Yahoo. These days, I configured Diigo to save a backup of all links to Delicious.
- Articles to read later – for long articles, I use Pocket.
I also use some features from Chrome to make things easier to organize:
- Google account synchronization – to keep all my instances of Chrome in sync with the same favorites structure
- Better History extension – to display past links and searches in a calendar form
- Simple Bookmarks extension – to allow the optional display of bookmarks in a side panel next to the browser window (feature sorely missing in Chrome)
- Session buddy – to save automatically long lists of open browser tabs (these tabs act as a memory of things to revisit soon, and need to be preserved from browser crashes)