Purging old bookmarks
Jun. 7th, 2011 10:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackHaving just transferred a lot of things to my new laptop (via dropbox and via my terabyte), I've been purging and sorting my firefox bookmarks.
There were several folders where I ended up dropping "things that looked interesting to look at later", but they were such a mess I never _did_. Now I have a bookmark folder sorted into categories (mostly by subject, but a few for "things I read day-to-day" and "stuff to blog about", etc, and also sorted by how I actually use them, eg. whether it's a "browse when I'm bored" category or "need in a hurry" category). And a couple of giant folders full of a lot of links I saved that are not really current any more.
I trawled through some of those to see what was in them, which was somewhat interesting :) Many I though I might well want to read when I was bored and triaged into more sensible folders. But I had many other observations as well:
* It would in many ways make more sense to delete the whole folder. That would make me feel more organised. But I couldn't do it. I'm too obsessive. But I noticed that with something like this there is a big difference between "deleting" and "archiving", so long as it's there somewhere I feel compelled to revisit it, at least occasionally.
* Much kudos to websites that have kept links from N years ago working. I know that doesn't _always_ matter, but it was very, very useful to me here. (I'd almost rather firefox automatically saved a copy of the webpage whenever you bookmarked something, just so you could see what it USED to be if it's later broken :))
* I am very embarrassed to admit I had stuff sitting around vaguely intending to look at it later for 5+ years. I really should do it, or delete it, and not let my brain fill up with trying to remember all the things it will maybe get to...
There were several folders where I ended up dropping "things that looked interesting to look at later", but they were such a mess I never _did_. Now I have a bookmark folder sorted into categories (mostly by subject, but a few for "things I read day-to-day" and "stuff to blog about", etc, and also sorted by how I actually use them, eg. whether it's a "browse when I'm bored" category or "need in a hurry" category). And a couple of giant folders full of a lot of links I saved that are not really current any more.
I trawled through some of those to see what was in them, which was somewhat interesting :) Many I though I might well want to read when I was bored and triaged into more sensible folders. But I had many other observations as well:
* It would in many ways make more sense to delete the whole folder. That would make me feel more organised. But I couldn't do it. I'm too obsessive. But I noticed that with something like this there is a big difference between "deleting" and "archiving", so long as it's there somewhere I feel compelled to revisit it, at least occasionally.
* Much kudos to websites that have kept links from N years ago working. I know that doesn't _always_ matter, but it was very, very useful to me here. (I'd almost rather firefox automatically saved a copy of the webpage whenever you bookmarked something, just so you could see what it USED to be if it's later broken :))
* I am very embarrassed to admit I had stuff sitting around vaguely intending to look at it later for 5+ years. I really should do it, or delete it, and not let my brain fill up with trying to remember all the things it will maybe get to...