PC User Net Guides: Tracking your travels

Rose Vines provides a guide to using, managing, converting and sharing bookmarks and favourites.
Links make the Web a wonderfully diverse and unpredictable resource. You start out checking your daily horoscope online, follow a link from there advertising an online music store, notice a reference to a new site dedicated to Mozart's piano concertos and surf on over, and end up on a travel site reading about Salzburg. The trouble with all this dashing about is that it's easy to forget where you've been and what route lead you to your own personal Salzburg. It's amazing how often you'll think "I must check this site/link out later" and then find you have no recollection of where the site is. Fortunately, both Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, as well as many other browsers, let you save the addresses of interesting sites as Bookmarks or Favorites. Unfortunately, the bookmark management in these browsers is far from perfect. While Navigator 4 does a pretty good job, Internet Explorer's Favorites are so bad one can only assume the IE4 team designed the interface after a very long lunch. It seems Microsoft feels the same, as IE5 -- still in development -- has a totally rewritten favourites section. Of course, the vacuum created by this lack of good bookmark management has been filled by dozens of third-party products which let you store, share, rearrange and play with your bookmarks to your heart's content. If you're a power surfer and use two or more browsers, there are programs that will let you consolidate and convert bookmarks from Navigator, Internet Explorer, Opera and Mosaic. We've included an array of these programs on this month's PC User Offline CD-ROM in the Tools section.
Using Navigator's bookmarks Drag-and-drop is the key to Navigator 4's bookmarks. You can create, rearrange and organise your bookmarks almost exclusively by dragging and dropping links from various parts of the Navigator window. On the Location toolbar to the left of the Location box are two icons: the Bookmark QuickFile and the Page Proxy. Click the Bookmark QuickFile to open your bookmarks folders. Navigator comes with a selection of bookmarks already categorised. To bookmark the current page, click the Add Bookmark option. This will add the bookmark to the bottom of the list. Alternatively, you can select File Bookmark and choose one of the existing folders to place the bookmark there. If you'd like to add a new folder or delete an existing folder or bookmark, select Edit Bookmark. This opens up a Windows Explorer-style view of your bookmarks. You can either right-click a bookmark to delete, rename or open it, or use the menus. As well as moving, copying, deleting and so on, you can check whether the content of any of your bookmarked sites has changed by opening the View menu and choosing Update Bookmarks. The Bookmark menus also let you sort and search through your bookmarks. One of the annoying things about Navigator's bookmarks is that they're automatically given the page title, which may or may not be useful. If you want to give a link a shorthand or good memory jogging name, you'll have to use Edit Bookmarks and go in and rename each link. Once you have your bookmark folders arranged, the easiest way to manage your bookmarks is to drag and drop them. You can drag any link from a page directly onto the Bookmarks QuickFile and from there into a folder. You can also use the Page Proxy to add the current page to a folder. When you rest your mouse pointer on the Page Proxy icon you'll see the bookmark tilt and a tooltip saying "Drag this to create a link to this page". You can drag it straight onto the Bookmarks QuickFile to add the current page. Yet another way to add a bookmark is to right-click a link on a Web page and choose Add Bookmark from the pop-up menu. This will add the bookmark to the bottom of the main list.
Using IE's Favorites With Internet Explorer 4 it's easy to add new Favorites. It's when you try to reorganise your existing Favorites that you'll find things become unwieldy. To add the current site to your Favorites do any of these things: Click and drag the page icon to the left of the site's address in the Address Box to the Favorites icon on the toolbar. This will place the page at the bottom of the main Favorites list. Click the Favorites Menu and choose Add To Favorites. A dialogue box will open allowing you to give the site a useful name, place it in an existing folder, or create a new folder by itself or within another folder. Right-click on the page and choose Add To Favorites. You can do much the same thing with links on a page: click and drag the link to the Favorites icon or right-click the link and choose Add To Favorites. IE4 also has a Favorites Bar: click the Favorites button on the toolbar to open a panel down the left side of your browser window. With the Favorites Bar open you have instant access to all your favorites while still being able to see the Web site. You can drag links directly into folders in the Favorites Bar. When you do so, the link will be added without giving you the chance to rename it. As with almost all aspects of IE, the right-click is the key: right-click a link and choose Rename from the pop-up menu. You can also use this pop-up menu to delete favourites or send them by e-mail to a friend or colleague. All this sounds pretty powerful. Why my earlier words of disdain about IE's Favorites? Just open the Favorites Menu and choose the Organize Favorites option. Up pops a dialogue box which makes it almost impossible to move your favourites around. You'd think Microsoft had never heard of Windows Explorer. To move a bookmark, you open the folder containing the bookmark, highlight the bookmark and click Move. Another window opens in which you select the destination folder and then click OK. Try going through this process with multiple bookmarks and you'll quickly realise how inadequate it is. Why not a single Explorer window with drag-and-drop capability? Who knows! A better method is to avoid the Organize Favorites option altogether and use the Favorites Bar in the browser window to do any rearranging; at least here you can use drag and drop like the digital deities intended. Of course, if you're a real Windows Explorer person, you can ignore the IE tools and open up the C:\Windows\Favorites folder in Windows Explorer and do all your bookmark management there.	You can turn your browser's bookmarks or favourites into a valuable research resource using products such as Amigo. Amigo imports IE, Navigator and Opera bookmarks and then lets you organise and annotate them. It lets you do the same thing with e-mail contacts and other types of information as well.
Sharing bookmarks If you use both Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, you'll find you end up with two out-of-sync collections of bookmarks. On the CD-ROM we've included a number of programs which let you combine your favourites and bookmarks. A couple of those programs will even keep the two sets of bookmarks in sync automatically. If you're using IE (or another browser), you can easily gain access to Navigator's bookmarks without reverting to a third-party program. Navigator stores its bookmarks in an HTML file, so all you need to do is open that file and add it to your favourites: In IE4 open the File Menu and choose Open. Click the Browse button and locate your Netscape Navigator bookmark file. It's a file called bookmark.htm which you'll usually find in C:\Program Files\Netscape\Users\Yourname. If you can't locate it, use the Start menu, Find, Files or Folders and search for bookmark.htm. Once you've found it, click OK to open the file. Now click Add To Favorites on the Favorites Menu or simply drag the Page Icon in the Address Box onto your Links toolbar. It's not very pretty, but it works.	If you visit a site and forget to add it to your Favorites, IE4's History Bar lets you track back through all the sites and pages you've visited recently. Click the History button on the toolbar to display the History Bar. You can adjust the number of pages kept in your history file by opening the View Menu, choosing Internet Options, and in the General Tab setting the Days To Keep Pages In History option.
Empowering your bookmarks If you're a serious surfer, you'll pretty soon tire of the limits in Navigator's and IE's bookmark management. Then it's time to try one of the many bookmark management programs available. We've included a selection of bookmark utilities on this month's CD-ROM, including bookmark managers, bookmark converters, sorters, printers, and more. If you do a lot of research work, you may find a program like Amigo suits you: it lets you organise your bookmarks and add notes and comments to them. For the more visually oriented, there's VisualBookMark, which gives you thumbnail views of your favourite sites. Some of the programs are free, some shareware, and some commercial demos. You're bound to find one that turns your morass of bookmarks into a resource goldmine.