I have been lazy with my bookmarking over the past 18 months. I don’t use the bookmarks in Firefox (or any browser for that matter) but instead use Google Bookmarks. This allows me to go from one computer to another and still be able to access my bookmarks very easily. If that browser has a Google Toolbar installed, its even easier.

But for a long time I’ve just been hitting the Star button on the toolbar and leaving it at that. I haven’t really been tagging/labelling my bookmarks since I originally imported them from my Firefox profile into Google Bookmarks. Of course, this leads to massive clutter and mess and makes it very difficult to locate bookmarks quickly and easily.

So today, after finally getting my computer working again, I logged into the website and started managing the bookmarks. And what a shock I did get. So many unsorted bookmarks that were in need of some TLC. A lot of them probably don’t even go anywhere any longer thanks to the fickle nature of websites now days. But I don’t know which yet.

So I’m finally sorting my bookmarks. Tagging them, arranging them, killing off dead links or bookmarks I’m never likely to find useful again. Over 2000 bookmarks to be sorted and so far I’ve only managed to get through about 200 of them. This is going to take a while. The scary thing is, theres about 3500 bookmarks in total.

I once tried using the del.icio.us addon for Firefox that basically supplanted your Firefox bookmarks entirely. It bothered me mostly because I didn’t like the way del.icio.us presents bookmarks. I also didn’t like that it always felt like a lot more effort to find and locate and store bookmarks in del.icio.us than in the browser natively.

Google Bookmarks being integrated into the Toolbar instead of the browser itself made things a lot easier. The menu is easily navigated and bookmarking something is just a single click effort. The only downside is that it doesn’t tag something by default. You have to edit the bookmark after saving it to add tags and the like. This is how I ended up in the situation I’m in now. ;-)

I really want and need a way of storing and managing bookmarks thats a lot simpler. Give me a drag and drop interface for attaching bookmarks to what I would call the “primary tag” and then when I edit them, allow me to add more tags from the edit window. This would make life a lot easier because the way I have my labels/tags at the moment, a lot of my bookmarks really only end up with a single tag anyway.

I rarely ever use the bookmarks I do save. I bookmark stuff more because the articles or pages or sites are possible discussion pieces in the future. Not because I’m ever likely to definitely read them again. For example, I have a huge number of Photoshop tutorials bookmarked, but I’m so useless with Photoshop that I don’t use it enough to be worth the effort. But then, there are times when someone has asked me how they could do something and so I’ve nearly always got a tutorial available for them.

Same applies to coding. I rarely code anything now days. I think the last thing I coded from scratch was the silly contact form on this blog. But I have so many code snippets and tutorials and discussion pieces bookmarked, I should be able to write my own version of Google Bookmarks from scratch.

I really need to reassess how I bookmark sites and what sites qualify for bookmarking. As things stand, it is going to take me a very long time to get my bookmarks under control.