BOOKMARKS ORGANIZATION - Personal Toolbar, Separators, etc.

See Backing up your profile! for important information!

How people use bookmarks seems to be one of the more personal things about all browsers, be it IE, Mozilla, Firefox, or any other one. My bookmarks.html file contains about 1,830 bookmarks and is about 430 Kb. Obviously, it's critical to have some kind of hierarchy to be able to find anything in there!

Here are some tips to use in organizing large bookmarks files. This is how I do things. I'm not saying it's the "best" way and it's certainly not the only way! Do what works best for you.

NOTES

In Firefox do this:

• Click View - Toolbars - Bookmarks Toolbar. This will "turn on" the Bookmarks toolbar.
• Then, click Bookmarks - Organize Bookmarks. Find or create a folder to hold frequently-used bookmarks. Highlight it. Do: Edit - Set as bookmarks toolbar folder. Then read on below and consider your bookmarks organization.

If the Personal Toolbar is not visible in SeaMonkey, then do this:

• Click View - Show/Hide - Personal Toolbar
• Then, click Bookmarks - Manage Bookmarks to open the Bookmarks Manager. Select the folder you want to be used for the Personal Toolbar. Click View - Set as Personal Toolbar. The folder I use is called Personal Toolbar (duh!).

organizing

• Use nested folders to set up categories of bookmarks. It will make finding things a whole lot easier. Examples:
  • Bookmarklets
  • Games
  • Google Searches
    • Catalogs
    • Image Search
    • Group Search
  • Media
  • Music
    • Blues
    • Folk
    • Jazz
    • Rock
  • Travel
  • TV
    • Local Channels
    • Networks
  • Radio
    • Local Channels
    • Networks
    • Online
  • Weather
• Alphabetize bookmarks within folders. Right-click a folder and choose "Sort folder by name." Most Web sites use a Title tag which is usually how the bookmark will be named in Mozilla and Firefox and that's what the sort will be based on. The few bookmarks that have either obscure or no Title tags can be quickly and easily Renamed.
• Put your most-used folders on your Personal Toolbar for the easiest and fastest access to a larger number of bookmarks.
• Maximize the use of the Personal Toolbar real estate by hiding the graphic icons and just use text (see screen shot below). You can then fit many more folders and bookmarks in the same amount of screen space. The way to do this is to add the following text to your userChrome.css file in your profile's chrome folder:

  /* Kill bookmark icons in the Personal Toolbar */
toolbarbutton.bookmark-item > .toolbarbutton-icon {
display: none;
}

  If there is no userChrome.css file in your profile, simply create one as a plain-text file or edit the example file that should be in the chrome folder.

  After turning off the PTB icons it's easy to figure out the difference between a folder and an active bookmark link. In SeaMonkey hover over the name. A folder will highlight and become a button. A bookmark link will simply highlight with an underline. In Firefox both icons are the same button but a simple link will show a pop-up tool tip with the URL of the bookmark.

• Put a "Temp" folder on your Personal Toolbar. I use this, for example, when I'm surfing through a long list of Google search results and don't have time to read everything right then. I just drag and drop the URLs from the location bar into the Temp folder on the PTB or the bookmarks sidebar for easy access when I have time to review the pages.
• Use separators to set off groups of bookmarks and folders.

  In Firefox you can right-click in either the bookmarks sidebar or the Bookmarks drop-down menu on the menu bar to insert a new separator. You can also insert, copy and move separators in the bookmarks manager.

  In SeaMonkey inserting separators can only be done using the Bookmarks Manager. However, in either browser's bookmarks sidebar you can:

  • Left-click, drag and move
  • CTRL+C to copy
  • CTRL+V to paste
  • CTRL+drag to copy
  • right-click for more options in a pop-up menu

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Another nifty trick!

"graeme" on alt.fan.mozilla made note of this pretty neat trick.

Both Mozilla and Firefox can have as your home page not just a single URL/file but also several pages that open in multiple tabs on startup. You can do this by opening just the tabs you want and then using the home page preferences menus to set "Use current group" (SeaMonkey) or "Use current pages" (Firefox). However, in Firefox (not SeaMonkey) you can also do this:

• Open Bookmarks - Manage Bookmarks - New Folder. Name it Autostart, or anything else you like, then drag and drop your favorite web sites into it in the order you like. Exit Bookmarks.
• Open Tools - Options - General then under Homepage, click on Use Bookmark. Select the folder whose bookmarks you want to open in tabs on browser startup. It can be the one we just created (Autostart) or any bookmarks folder. Click on OK.
• Close Firefox and then re-open it. Shazaam!

You can select any folder at Tools - Options - General - Use Bookmark. When you click OK FF writes a string into the "location(s)" bar that contains the URLs in the selected folder, separated by a vertical bar "|". So far as I can tell, FF makes no association to the selected folder that is remembered from session to session. You can drag and drop in the Bookmark Manager (or the Bookmark sidebar) to change the order of the startup tabs. You can even add or remove bookmarks. However, you then need to re-do the definition of the Home Page location(s) as in the step: Tools - Options - General - Home Page - Use Bookmark.

You can also manually edit the Home Page(s) by using about:config and editing the pref: browser.startup.homepage. Further, accomplish changes by editing manually the string in the Tools - Options - General - Home Page location(s) bar.

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Another nifty trick! - 2

Once you have a separator you can right-click on it, choose Properties and enter a name. The name will show up at the beginning of the line so you can identify the groups of bookmarks below that separator! I think this is very cool! The separator names will show up in the sidebar but not the Bookmarks drop-down menu. See the screen shot and notice how the folders on my Personal Toolbar are delineated by separators for clarity. Notice the named separators in the bookmarks sidebar.

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Another nifty trick! - 3

You can change the display of the name on the separator line. In the chrome folder of your profile location copy and paste these lines into your userChrome.css file. (The userChrome.css file file does not exist by default. Simply create one using a plain-text editor (like Notepad).)

The first section will change the display of the name on the separator line to bold, italic, deep red text.

The second section changes the display of the name text on the separator when highlighted to a blue background with white text.

You can use most standard CSS formatting rules in these sections to change the separator line's name appearance.

/* BEGIN customize bookmark separators */
treechildren:-moz-tree-cell-text(Name, separator) {
color: #aa5522 !important;
font-style: italic !important;
font-weight: bold !important;
}

treechildren:-moz-tree-cell-text(Name, separator, selected, focus) {
color: #FFFFFF !important;
background: #3333ff !important;
}
/* END customize bookmark separators */