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Bookmark Hoarding Is a Serious Condition – Let Me Help You with That!

Sometimes I get really specific problems that nobody else really gets. For instance, I have a comic character who speaks in a stereotypical fake French accent and I find that sort of thing hard to write, so I built a translator to turn perfectly good English into fake French.

On a completely different note, I have a condition where I obsessively bookmark things. This is the part in the self-help group where I would stand up and say “hello, my name is Sean Payne and I am a bookmark hoarder”. It’s a serious condition.

I tend to bookmark websites and webpages with intention of coming back to them or to share them later on but usually do not1. This has resulted in some 3,000+ bookmarks in my bookmarks bar and is actually causing a moment of lag when opening the bookmarks bar in Firefox. Attempts to go through the bookmarks have been fruitless; I could normally get through about 50 bookmarks a night (deleting, categorising) before giving up, and then I would just go and add more bookmarks in the following days, negating my efforts.

Bookmarks Before
Seriously, that sidebar can be scrolled for entire minutes before you reach the bottom.

There’s been a nagging “to-do” item on my list to finally get these all sorted and the other day I finally got fed up of wading through the damn things, so over the course of a few nights I threw together a fairly simple bookmark sorter. It appears to work fine with Safari bookmarks, Firefox bookmarks and Google Chrome bookmarks.

Now my bookmarks bar looks like this:

Bookmarks After
Much better!

If you have a similar condition I hope the bookmark sorter can help you. One disclaimer: I admit that it has been specifically tailored around my bookmarks, so if you spend most of your time looking at antique 1950’s-era cars or ornate lace-making it’s probably going to dump most of your bookmarks into the “misc” folder. If, however, you’re a big fan of video games, shopping, humour articles and social media, this might do the trick for you2.

I am open to suggestions on other categories to add – just leave a comment below (you can log in using Facebook or Twitter) and if I think it’s worthwhile I might just add it to the bookmark filtering!3

Start using the HTML bookmark sorter today!

Postscript (25/05/15)

If you’re at all interested in the inner workings of the bookmark sorter, I wrote a blog post about how I did it.

  1. I know there are online services out there specifically designed to help with bookmark clutter but I am quite happy with using built-in browser bookmarks thank you very much. ↩
  2. No, it does not sort pornography. Sorry. ↩
  3. No, I won’t add pornography filtering. Sort your own damn smut out. ↩

Post by | May 10, 2015 at 4:56 pm | Projects, Technology | No comment

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