Organizing Bookmarks

Posted by David Garner
Jul 19, 2020 at 09:52 AM

I’m seeking tools and ideas about methodologies to capture and organize information.

I’m interested in getting better at handling discovery of new projects/efforts/products/techniques.

Obviously, “Google is my friend”. I’m not sure of the many privacy aspects associated with the Google ecosystem, but when I want to learn more about things that I run into, asking Google about it usually provides insights, even if only finding something about it on Wikipedia.

I’ve become a real fan of the Chrome bookmark functionality. I have been using it to capture websites (URLs) for a few years now. I find it to be a deceptively simple system. It allows creating hierarchies of folders to organize topics. I like that it synchronizes data between my various computing devices (PCs, Chromebooks, tablets, phones, voice assistants?) so it’s easy and convenient to capture and access the information.

In my browsers, I have the bookmarks bar turned on and I have folders to organize the places which I visit frequently. I also have a folder named “Research”. When I encounter a mention of a new to me: _____, I double click and copy the name of it and then right click and search Google for the name. This then opens a new tab with the search results. I then peruse the search results and, if there is something which seems to make sense, as a match for the desired result, I will right click on the link and open it in a new tab.

If the page which is presented, seems to contain information about the desired topic, I look to see if the bookmark “star” at the right end of the address bar is empty or filled in. If it is empty, I click the “star” to open the bookmarking dialog and then click, in the box following the Folder label. At the bottom of the list that appears, I click “Choose Another folder…”. That opens another dialog showing all the bookmarks that are in my system. I’ve found that, if I click in the blank space, in the upper right portion of the dialog, that it will navigate to the top of the outline tree. During normal usage, that usually results in some collapsed daily usage folders, followed by the “Research” folder. I then click on the “Research” folder and, at the bottom of the dialog, I click on the “New Folder” button. I continue by right clicking the highlighted “New Folder” text in the edit box and select “Paste”, in the right click popup dialog. Once the name is entered in the “New Folder” text box, I click on the “Save” button at the lower right of the bookmark dialog.

The above procedure seems complicated, when you think about it as described above, but after doing it a few hundred times, it is mostly muscle memory, and takes little time to execute. At this point, if I had time, I would review the contents of the newly bookmarked page and recursively search and bookmark any further information that seems to be of interest. I might return to the Google search results and repeatedly open and save links to any additional pages which contain potentially interesting information.

Following the above procedure, I’ve found that I sometimes do not recall encountering the name of the technology, but I have already bookmarked it, at some time in the past. If I have time, I will further explore the bookmarks, for the name, and see if I can remember what I had previously discovered about the topic, or learn more about it, while it is once again in context.

The problem I have with this simple bookmarking system is that it is too simple. I now have a bunch (thousands) of folders with information about things I’d like to learn more about but opening the Bookmark Manager is like walking into a library. It’s not always clear where to start. The Bookmark Manager provides the ability to sort in numerous ways, which can help see duplicated entries and make locating things more obvious, but when things are related to other things, it is not at all obvious what those relationships might be, and I’ve not figured out how to encode those types of characteristics into the simple tree view.