September 08, 2005

• Not a program, but I'm a big fan of del.icio.us. HTML links, comments, and even tags to organize. Plus you can access your bookmarks from any computer at any time. Very nicely-made beginner's guide here. Other than that, your free-est and lightest-weight option would be just to draw up a simple HTML doc, roll your own links, and set it as your browser's homepage. A bit more work involved that way (though not much, really, unless you wanted to do some fancy CSS shizznit), but no need to install software, and you control layout. That would take up almost zero space on a flash drive, too, if you want to take it portable.
• It's not a Windows app, but del.icio.us does something similar, in case you hadn't seen it / heard of it before. As a web app, it renders your bookmarks accessible from any internet-connected PC, any OS, etc. That alone makes it very worthwhile, IMHO. del.icio.us also allows you to organize your bookmarks with tags, and describe them with comments. Myself, I have my (Mozilla) browser's home page set to the browser's own HTML bookmark file. So alt-home always brings up a searchable list of bookmarks. No comments allowed, but it's very quick and easy to set up, and FireFox can do the same.
• jinx, L2D owes me a beer.
• I'll buy you a beer if you teach me how to use the preview button now and then.
• furl is another one of those online bookmark list things. I haven't tried del.icio.us, but it seems popular. Can any monkeys provide us with some compelling reasons to go with one over the other?
• All the cool kids use del.icio.us. You want to be one of the cool kids, don't you? Not having used Furl, I can't offer reasons to use one or the other. But after skimming the Furl site I can see some differences: Furl is a free service that saves a personal copy of any page you find on the Web... Each member gets a 5-gigabyte personal archive... del.icio.us doesn't do anything like that, it just keeps bookmarks, i.e., URLs. If a bookmarked page is removed or changed, the del.icio.us bookmark will be affected. It sounds like a Furl saved page wouldn't be affected, which could be an important advantage in some situations and a minor inconvenience in others. Furl seems to be oriented around Furl Toolbar and Furl Button browser plug-ins that get installed on the user's PC, whereas del.icio.us has no software to install at all - it just uses a couple of ordinary browser bookmarks.
• you should use Furl because I work for the company that owns it :)
• oh, and furl is browser independent, you don't need to use the toolbar.
• I use both Furl and del.icio.us, but for different things. I like the folksonomy (tags) aspect of del.icio.us for bookmarks. I can look up all my history bookmarks or music marks anywhere, but del.icio.us lets me look up my history+music bookmarks, which is very useful. I use it for general bookmark collection. Furl lets me keep copies of pages, which is very useful for keeping a record of news coverage of events over time. I use it for news articles I want to keep and it's where I store things I want to blog. (FWIW, I'm on a Mac with Safari and don't use anybody's toolbars.)
• The only thing that sucks about del.icio.us is that they haven't implemented a sitewide search function yet. Though I hear that's on the to-do list. You can search tags, however. But I love it. IMO, the simplest tools are the best, and it's about as simple and direct as it gets. If you want to get all fancy and hip and do what the hipsters do with their jazz music and their hipness and their pelvises and their hippopotamuses and their TiddlyWikis, then you could use a TiddlyWiki to organize your bookmarks. Use different tiddlers for different categories, etc. They're animated!
• I thought of a tiddlywiki too. I've had one on my pc for a couple of months now. It's so cool, I swear I can put it to good use for something, but I have yet to figure out what.
• I've been trying to use one for writing, but I haven't worked out a worthwhile system yet.