After years and years of accumulating bookmarks on multiple machines and userids my web browser bookmark situation is totally unmanageable. The problem is made worse by clueless webpage designers who choose completely worthless or misleading page titles so the default often tells you nothing and you wind up editing them all by hand.

But how to manage this mess? Even putting everything in categories doesn't seem to deal with the sheer mass. (Maybe it's time for integrated MySQL in browser bookmarks manager ) And the search function doesn't help all that much because you can't move or delete things from the search results (as least not in Mozilla).

How is everybody dealing with this issue?

Not using bookmarks at all. Google has been invented

EDIT: I see no reason for using bookmarks; when I did so somewhere around the medieval times, the pages always swiftly moved or did something nasty to break my bookmarks, in addition to the problem you described (the titles). So..why use bookmarks when you can simply search for the pages? Nowadays it's just as quick.

I put my bookmarks on line. Bookmax is good. Yahoo's myweb2 is also good.

A lot of the stuff I bookmarked came after hours of searching. If I had to find them all again (admittedly, very questionable) it would take years.

For example, sometimes you find some critical piece of doc (you don't want to save it because someone is updating it periodically) on an ftp server. And you follow link after link and finally find what you need. You don't want to have to search like that again.

I need some way to manage this stuff.

That's totally out of the question for me. Whatever I do has to be saved locally.

What are some of the features those sites offer that make managing bookmarks easier? Maybe we could write a script or app to do similar things.

If not, I just may do the database idea. All I have to do after that is figure out how to hook it into Mozilla.

I organize my bookmarks by type in folders and subfolders. Their page title may be misleading, but if I put the bookmark int eh correct folder I can find it again.. and I can always change the name of the bookmark to something that makes more sense..

If I can't find a bookmark then it's my own fault for not filing it properly..

Hey man, long time no hear! Good to see you around.

I do like you said but still, I haven't counted but I have to have a thousand bookmarks (maybe more) across a couple of machines. Even that system falls short because of the lack of a good bookmark search and editing system.

I feel your pain. I'm in the same boat, and the problem magnifies itself when I use numerous computers with different OS's all the time. I keep waiting for Mozilla to produce real roaming user support for bookmarks, but I've about turned blue holding my breath.
My long term solution has begun by sending myself e-mails with the links I want to save. I preface the subject line of each email with the key word [Bookmark], and then I use mail filters to move them all to one (or two) mail folders on my IMAP mail server. My ultimate goal is to write something in perl that will, daily, suck all of the contents of the [Bookmark] mail folder into a relational database, and provide an web based front end for querying it.
Your question here has upped my motivation a bit to get on with the process.
Has anyone already done something like this?

--- rod.

except for toolbar links to frequently used sites, i hardly ever use browser based bookmarks anymore. i seem to have unintentionally adopted a weird kind of complicated system with some bookmarks on certain home pages, some in email accounts, some going from memory in threads i've posted on a related forum (search by username and keyword usually finds the thread ), some in community based things like linux bookmarks, some on the toolbar, etc.

usually these days i just email the URL to my gmail account, sometimes using a subject line prefix that i set up to filter. for example, the subject line for a linux bm would be prefixed with [lin] or [lnx], and would then get labeled and archived with the "linux" label. when i need to find something, i can usually remember some key word of the subject, and the gmail search is fast and accurate. or else i just use google, or go to a home page with links i've set up, etc.

theNbomr, i just read your post, and it's interesting that not only do we both send to email, but we both even use brackets with keywords to filter. i bet a lot of people do that these days, as the idea of localized bookmarks on one machine is very dated and impractical. the idea of making a database with web front end is a great idea, i wonder if there are already any open source projects that do that? bookmax sounds promising, will have to check it out. something that i could run on my own server would be ideal, though. i already have a page with bookmarks on it, but it's just a plain html page and i have to add the links to it manually. there must be better solutions out there.

These exist for debian, I bet they do for your distro

I also have 2 huge bookmarks (which are still not merged.. lazy me).
Its very important IMO.
The big problem is how to organize!!

If somebody has an idea. I'm thinking of mind mapping but haven't got an answer.

Okay, I just tried out the perl module Net::IMAP::Simple, and with a tiny modification to their example code, I was able to see my Bookmarks folder from a commandline. That was too easy. I gotta get on this, now. I should have a some time this evening to try out some more and design a simple database. Right now I'm thinking just one table, with a URL, a description (based on the Subject: line), and maybe some comments pulled from the content of the email message. If I want to get really fancy, my mail-folder reader just might do something like visit the links and suck out some keywords (oh yah, keywords, we gotta have keywords, too) and/or test the validity of the links.
Then we just need a bit of perl/PHP to display the whole database in a HTML table, and provide a search form. Yup, I'm definitely seeing how this will happen. Have I missed any key ingredient?

--- rod.

How about http://sitebar.org/ ?

A OSS toolbar to keep your bookmarks syncronized between systems and browsers, you can even run your own server for it so you don't have to use the public ones..

another option for having your bookmarks is a USB drive and Portable Firefox

As for better management, sorting and searching.. will keep thinking about that. Firefox keeps the bookmarks in an html file so you could simply open bookmarks.htm and search it for text.. crude but it works..

Thanks for the link. Yeah, Mozilla works the same way with bookmarks in html. If I get a creative urge I'll think about working up some database solution. That shouldn't be too difficult. The hard part (for me, anyway) will be browser integration.