The Horror of The Bookmarks

After a lot of postponing, I finally came around to organizing my bookmarks. I have a lot of them. I have about 4000 bookmarks (after deleting duplicates and removing dead links).

So here I am, with a directory tree in which some directories have more than 400 items. What am I going to do? This is a pretty difficult question, with no easy answer.

The inquiring minds want to know: "Why in the world do you need 4000 bookmarks?". After all, my room mate says: "You should only put in the bookmark folder the stuff that you use very often". Good candidates amongst this are: IMDB, ,Storage Review, Google News and some similar stuff.

This seems a reasonable recommendation. However, you have to ask yourselves: Why should you put these particular ones there? If you visit those addresses often enough, you remember them easily. Even more, Opera has a nice feature (nicknames) which makes it redundant for people to look in the Bookmark folder for the most visited websites.

In my opinion, Bookmarks are for that section of the web which has (or had at some point in time) relevance to you. I for one, realized that in time, my interests travel a rather spiral trajectory. I focus on one domain of activity for a period of time, which leads me to another domain and so forth, until I come back at the activity that started it all, but with a higher understanding of the problem.

So the bookmark menu should have in my opinion a lot of links which should be used to give you new ideas. You should easily have access to all of them.

This is not to say that some pages never loose relevance. For example, I was at some point in time interested in learning VRML. However I never got to learning it. Those bookmarks were deleted a few years ago, considering that VRML proved irrelevant.

How did I solve the problem? Well... I didn't fully solved it. I used a makeshift hierarchy of directories that I mapped on the system. Unfortunately, my hierarchy is not perfect.

It seems that for a large number of results, folder based strategy is suddenly very limiting. I would rather have an approach similar to the label system used by GMail. Unfortunately, I don't really have that thing here.

The final solution is probably going to involve a script, which will take the hierarchy of directories from dmoz or somewhere else and automatically place each link in the appropriate directory. This will probably have a better result. Unfortunately I was so lazy these days that I was unable to finish the script. When it's done, I will post a link to it here.