Does this sound familiar? You’re surfing the internet, and you come across an article or a website that you really really want to read, but you don’t have the time or the energy to take it all in right now. So you bookmark the page, with the intention of revisiting it soon. But you don’t. You thought you would. You intended to. But you didn’t. And then, sometime not too far in the future, it happens again! You think “this is a great article, I’ll definitely come back and read this one later.” And so you bookmark another page, that you will never come back to.
So over time this happens again and again and again, until finally you look at the bookmarks stored in your browser only to realize that somehow, you’ve accumulated thirty-seven bajillion bookmarks! You frantically begin clicking on them, and they bring you to web pages you don’t even remember seeing before! Or even worse: you really want to revisit that site you were looking at, but can’t remember the name of it, and can’t locate the bookmark among all the others.
Friends, bookmark abuse has to stop, and it has to stop now! There’s an easier way. We can fix this. We have the technology.
See, bookmarks are meant as a way for us to store pages and sites which we visit frequently. If you’re only visiting a site once, there’s no need to bookmark it. Instead, simply go up to the page’s URL in your address field, grab the icon to the left of the http:// part and drag it to your desktop.
This creates a webloc (web location) file on your desktop which, when double-clicked upon, will launch your default browser and bring you back to that page.
In this way, you can organize your web clippings into folders, and simply throw them into the recycle bin when you’re done with them. No more bookmark craziness! This works with all web browsers on both the Mac and Windows operating systems.
This little-known trick is a life-saver for folks who do a lot of research on the web, though for those people, there are reading list services such as Instapaper and Read It Later. Both of these services are free, have browser extensions which can be installed into Safari and Firefox (for Macintosh and Windows), and both have their own iPhone apps.
Click HERE to learn more about Instapaper
Click HERE to learn more about Read it Later.
