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19 May 2010
In this tutorial, we will learn how to create and manage bookmarks in Firefox and use the tagging system to allow us to find our bookmarks quickly and easily.
This particular tutorial was written in response to a member’s request, but visiting with Jerk this evening and watching him try to dig through his unsorted bookmarks to show me a few interesting links he’d found made me realize how useful this could be to some.
Let’s start with the basics! Bookmarks (or Favorites, depending on your Internet browser of choice) function precisely like the name implies. If we imagine the Web as a massive book with millions of pages, bookmarking allows us to “virtually” mark pages of interest in order to allow us to refer or return to them quickly and easily. Whether you came across a page by accident or searched for hours, knowing how to bookmark effectively will save you a lot of frustration and a lot of time.
How to create effective bookmarks in Firefox:
For the purposes of this tutorial, let’s assume you want to bookmark www.dodisdodat.com or one of the site’s pages.
While not necessary, it is easier to create a bookmark while on the actual page you want to add to your favorites. A handy keyboard shortcut for creating a bookmark which works in ALL browsers is the “Ctrl+D” combination. In Firefox, if you wish to create a quick bookmark without categorizing, renaming or assigning tags, you can simply click once on the small white star in the address bar.
The star goes from white to gold and the site is bookmarked.
This, however, is only useful for quick reference as, invariably, your bookmarks folder gets messy and fairly unusable rather quickly. To create a proper bookmark, click twice on the star (rather than only once) or use the Ctrl+D keyboard shortcut. This brings up the following bookmark window.
The first thing you’ll want to do is rename the bookmark. Often, people make the mistake of leaving the “default” entry in the name field, which in many cases is a long, meaningless URL (web address) that makes it extremely difficult to identify afterwards. In this case, I’ll change “Learn how to…dodisdodat.com” to the much more succinct “Dodisdodat”.
It only takes a few seconds to organize your bookmarks by placing them into folders and subfolders. From the “Folder” field, click the drop down menu to select, first either the “Bookmarks Toolbar” (which is displayed directly in your browser window) or the “Bookmarks Menu” which is accessed by clicking “Bookmarks” from the menu (Ctrl+B), then by selecting an appropriate folder. If you don’t have an appropriate folder for this particular bookmark, you can create one quickly by clicking “Choose”.
This expands the current bookmarks window. I only ever place bookmarks on the “Bookmarks Toolbar” that I will use daily or regularly, which is a great place for a bookmark to www.dodisdodat.com. However, as most bookmarks are better suited for the ”Bookmarks Menu”, let’s click that and then click the “New Folder” button.
I try not to be too pointed when naming folders. Ending up with hundreds of folders does little to help you in effectively managing your bookmarks. I like fairly encompassing names like “Funny Stuff”, “Tutorials”, “Social Networks”, etc… In this case, www.dodisdodat.com would fit well in a folder called “Tutorials”…so that’s what we’ll create.
An important thing to remember here is that your new folder will always be created under the selected item. We had selected “Bookmarks Menu” and our folder was created there. If you happen to have another folder selected when you click the “New Folder” button, your new folder will be created inside that selected folder – great for creating sub folders (i.e. we wanted to create a sub folder under “Tutorials” for a specific topic like GIMP or Internet).
In this final step, we will insert tags for this bookmark. Tags are extremely useful in helping us find bookmarks when we may have forgotten what name we had assigned or even what a particular bookmarked site contained.
Type in as many tags or keywords (separate them with commas) as you like – the more the better. For this bookmark, I’ll use “tutorials, joomla, internet, email, gimp, office, how to” – which will help me know in the future what I can expect to find on the site. Satisfied? Click “Done”.
How to access or find your bookmarks in Firefox:
Now, assuming you use the above technique for creating your bookmarks, your bookmarks menu should look neat and organized – something like this:
Using a proper folder structure definitely allows you to find important bookmarks quickly. If your menu doesn’t look like this one yet, don’t worry – we’ll show you how to organize your current mess a little later. For now, let’s look at the different ways you can access or find and use your bookmarks.
Method #1: The browser menu.
From the menu, click “Bookmarks” (or Alt+B) and simply scroll down to the appropriate folder, then the bookmark and click.
Method #2: The bookmarks sidebar.
Pressing Ctrl+B calls up the bookmarks sidebar. Having the sidebar displayed offers 2 advantages. The first is that your bookmark folders (and links) are always visible which is great if you are going to be visiting several bookmarked sites. This saves you from making your way to the browser menu repeatedly.
The second advantage is the VERY handy “Search” field. Type in a name or keyword (remember those tags we created?) and corresponding bookmarks will be shown.
Method #3: The browser address bar.
What? The address bar? Yep! Ever notice when you open a new or blank tab in Firefox that the address bar displays the text “Search Bookmarks and History”?
Regardless if you have a new or existing tab, if you start typing a keyword or tag in your address bar, corresponding results will be displayed below. Note how tags we inserted earlier show up (as indicated by the second arrow). Also, actual bookmarks are distinguished from simply sites in your history by the gold star.
That’s all pretty neat, but how does one go about organizing an existing bookmark mess?
From the menu, select “Bookmarks>Organize Bookmarks” or press Ctrl+Shift+B to open your bookmarks library.
From the library window, click on either the Bookmark Toolbar or Bookmark Menu, whichever requires cleaning. Folders will be displayed on the left. Simply drag your unsorted bookmarks to their corresponding folder and release.
Before sorting bookmarks to their folders however, you may want to rename some of them and add tags. To do this, simply select the bookmark to edit and modify the name or add tags in the fields at the bottom of the library window.
To delete bookmarks you aren’t using anymore, simply right-click and select delete from the contextual menu.
That should cover it. Follow these tips and you should have a clean and organized bookmark menu in no time. Now both you and Jerk should be able to find those important links in no time!
Thanks for reading!
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