Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on October 27, 2007 by CyberNet.

Weekend Website

With so many “social” online bookmark services available like Del.icio.us, some of the “non-social” services have been pushed to the background. Today’s weekend website is Quick Bookmarks, a great tool to help you manage your personal bookmarks without the social side. Not only does it utilize tabs and groups to keep all of your important links organized, it can also be used as an RSS aggregator. Because it’s an online service, you can manage and access your bookmarks no matter where you are.  If you already have a bookmark solution that you’re satisfied with, this would be a great place to backup all of your favorite bookmarks, especially because you can import your bookmarks. For those of you with insanely long lists of bookmarks that aren’t organized, I recommend trying out Quick Bookmarks to see if it’s a good organization solution for you.

Getting Started

The first thing that you’ll need to do to start using Quick Bookmarks is to signup for an account.  All you have to do is choose a user name, provide an email address, and select a password – that’s it! Once you’re all signed up, you’ll be brought to a generic main page which has a handful of different sites already bookmarked and a few RSS feeds displayed. This is just to get you started. You’re able to delete any of the bookmarks and start adding your own.

Features

• Store and organize your bookmarks in tabs and groups
• Show the original site icons near every bookmark
• Import bookmarks (if you have an HTML file with your bookmarks)
• Export bookmarks

Settings

Once you have an account created, click “settings” up at the top to specify how you’d like this service to work for you. Some of those options include:

• Turning on “Snap” Shots to get previews of the bookmarked site before you click
• Removing the Google search bar
• The option to display site icons
• Change the skin from blue (default) to red green or black
• Options for how often to refresh RSS feeds from 5mn. to 60mn.

CLICK TO ENLARGE

Adding a New Tab

Much like personalized homepages like iGoogle, Quick Bookmarks allows you to create multiple tabs.  For example, you could have a tab just for the bookmarks to all of your news sites or one for all of your work related sites.  You choose the name of the tab, add a description, enter some keywords, and select whether or not you want the tab to be public which means they can be shared with family and friends.

Adding a Group

Under each tab will be groups like “Search Engines,” “shopping,” “music,” etc. You can add a group by clicking “Add new group, RSS or Gadget” at the top of the page.  Once you do this, you’ll be able to create a name for the group and then decide upon the type.  Different types of groups include bookmarks, RSS Reader, Gadget, Last Visited bookmarks, or Text Content.

Adding new bookmarks

I was disappointed to find that the “Add new bookmark” button at the top of the page does not work.  This is a bug which I’ve reported, and hopefully it will be fixed soon. During the mean time, you can use the “Plus” sign which you’ll find next to each of the groups as displayed in the image below (explanation of numbers following the image):

1. Add a bookmark – click this button to add a bookmark
2. Modify the group
3. Move the group
4. Sort bookmarks in alphabetical order
5. Read news from your favorite feeds

Once you click the plus sign to add a bookmark, you’ll enter in the site URL  There is also a field for the Site Name which you can leave blank, and Quick Bookmarks will fill it in for you. You can also add a few notes if there’s something you want to remember about the link.

Customization

Much like what you’d expect with personalized homepages, you can drag and drop all of your groups, RSS items, and Gadgets around on each of the tabs and place them exactly where you’d like them to be among three different columns.

Wrapping it up

Overall I’d say that Quick Bookmarks is a practical solution for those of you looking for a way to organize your bookmarks without the socialness.  My favorite things about this service are that you can both import and export a bookmark file which is extremely helpful, but I also like that you can add RSS items. It’s also great to be able to add tabs and groups to keep everything organized. Once they get the bug fixed with the new bookmark button, I’ll be a happy camper.

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