Five ways to master bookmarks
in Firefox 3
Posted by Josh Lowensohn
June 23, 2008
Besides the face-lift, one of Firefox 3's
less flashy, but incredibly useful features, is the new bookmarking system.
Yeah, there are still folders and bookmarklets, but joining the party are
useful items like tags, smart backup, and a new way to track which sites
you're actually visiting to help weed out what's unneeded.
We've put together a small guide to help you
take advantage of bookmarking in Firefox 3. If you put these lessons to
use, you'll go from having a big, clumsy menu of sites you like to an ever-changing
list that can quickly be parsed and prioritized with minimal effort.
Step 1: Master the quickie
On a site you like? Don't bother with keyboard
shortcuts (although Ctrl+Shift+L is dead easy); just hit the new star button
in the address bar. It'll quick-save it to your bookmarks list the same
way the keyboard shortcut does, although it saves a click or two by skipping
the "edit this bookmark" dialogue that usually pops up when you try to
squirrel a link away.
If
you do want to access that dialogue without having to delve into the full-fledged
bookmark editor, just click on the star again and you'll get that same
drop-down menu with quick fields you can fill in to edit tags or simply
remove the link from your bookmarks.
With tags, save typing and a visit to figure
out what a site is about.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Step
2: Use tags
Tags are helpful. If you're bookmarking a
site you think you're going to keep around, it's worth tagging. The biggest
reason is that Firefox will now use tags as shortcuts in the address bar,
meaning that if you tag this article "awesome," typing awesome into the
bar will automatically pull up this page as one of the top results. It'll
also take any tags you've previously added and autofill them for you as
you type. This makes it easy to fill in some simple descriptions quickly
and efficiently.
To quickly add pre-existing tags without typing
anything, just hit the little down arrow in the bookmarking menu. This
will list all of the tags you've typed in before, and simply clicking on
any one of them will add it as a tag.
Step 3: Use smart bookmarks and
folders to discover new content
Are you an iTunes user? If so, you may be
familiar with smart playlists, the playlists that will automatically fill
with tracks based on what boolean values you set up. Firefox 3 has two
similar features called smart bookmarks and smart folders that let you
do this using query strings or simple searches. Now as a warning, this
isn't as simple to do as it is in iTunes, which has drop-down menus, but
the good news isthat there a ton of pre-built options you can simply copy
and paste.
* Smart bookmarks: Smart
bookmarks are a grouping of links that change based on what values you
plug into them. To make your own, click on bookmarks, then "organize bookmarks"
(you can also hit Ctrl+Shift+B). Highlight "bookmarks menu" from the source
list below, then right-click on it and select "new bookmark." All the magic
for making a smart bookmark is in the location field, which is where you'll
be dropping in a line of code that does all the heavy lifting. These codes
can range from simple queries to a string that will search a domain and
give you the latest stories, or simply those related to a keyword. The
possibilities are nearly endless. The sad truth is that this method is
complicated. MozillaZine has a huge thread on the ins and outs of building
your own code strings, as does CyberNet News. Just keep in mind that you'll
have to have some basic coding knowledge to build your own from scratch.

Saving sites you've
been to in a certain genre can be a time saver. Smart bookmark folders
let you do this the easy way.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
* Smart folders: Smart folders
are similar to smart bookmarks but require far less work. There are a few
ways to make smart folders for things like your browser history and browsing
habits, but one of my favorite uses is to create little folders of bookmarks
based on where you've been.
To start, just
get back to that organize bookmarks menu (Ctrl+Shift+B) and use the search
box on the top right. When you type a name it'll search both history and
bookmarks. You can pick either of those, or both categories, and save it
as a search, which will now reside in your bookmarks toolbar as a smart
folder. If you add or visit a site with that word or domain in the name
it will automatically show up in that list, saving you from having to re-categorize
it. These are incredibly useful if you drop them down into the bookmarklets
bar, since they'll act as drop-down menus that will save you crucial screen
real estate.
Firefox 3 keeps multiple backups of your bookmarks,
but so should you.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Step
4: Import/export and backing up your bookmarks
There's nothing worse than having to try and
remember all the things you've bookmarked in case of a hard drive crash
or corrupted file. Save yourself the trouble and make backups from time
to time.
My way of doing this is to use two of Google's
services, Gmail and Google Calendar, to bundle reminders and file storage
in one place. Step one is setting up a Google Calendar reminder every month
for a backup. Now, every time you get the reminder just go organize bookmarks,
then click on "import and backup."
Save the backup JSON file to your desktop and
e-mail it to yourself in Gmail. Be sure to set up a bookmarks label and
tag every backup with it so you'll save yourself some time searching later
on.
Now, what if you lose everything and need to
re-import? If you've got a copy of that JSON file laying around you just
import it using that same menu you just used to do the backup. Likewise,
you can go back to previous versions of your bookmarks by selecting an
earlier date from the drop-down list, although I wouldn't recommend doing
that unless you've made a mess of the ones you have.
Step
5: Make it social
OK, so you don't want to use Gmail and Google
Calendar while saving and uploading files. I really can't blame you. A
far simpler solution is tying in your bookmarks with a service like Delicious,
Magnolia, or Mister Wong.
Of the three, my personal preference is Delicious,
if only for its community and browser plug-in that was recently updated
to work in both Firefox 3 and IE7. We've written about Delicious many times
before, but the gist is that you can access your bookmarks from anywhere,
and when saving a bookmark it'll automatically suggest tags for you based
on what other people have saved that same link with. It's a huge time-saver,
and if you're seriously into Firefox 3's tagging system, you'll end up
saving a lot of time by integrating it with Delicious.
If you don't feel like sharing with anyone
else you can also check out Foxmarks, which also has multi-browser bookmark
sync and backup. |