Number 199 - December 1999

Playing With Favorites How to manage and customize your bookmarks
from HP AT Home Magazine ... for our home computing users
In Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, bookmarking a site is as simple as clicking on the browser's "Favorites" (Internet Explorer) or "Bookmarks" (Navigator) button and choosing the "Add" option. What's not so simple is managing and customizing the hundreds of bookmarks that accumulate over time. Here are four tips that can help. Deleting a favorite or bookmark   Internet Explorer 3.0 & 4.0     Go to "Favorites/Organize Favorites." Highlight the Favorite you want to remove, and click on "Delete."   Navigator 3.0     Go to "Bookmarks/Go to Bookmarks." Highlight the Bookmark you want to remove, and then press the "Delete" key.   Navigator 4.0     Go to "Bookmarks/Edit Bookmarks." Highlight the Bookmark you want to remove, choose "Edit," and then press the "Delete" key. Renaming a favorite or bookmark   Internet Explorer 3.0 & 4.0     Go to "Favorites/Organize Favorites." Highlight the Favorite whose name you want to change. Click "Rename," and then type in a new title for the Favorite.    Navigator 3.0 & 4.0     Go to "Bookmarks/Go to Bookmarks" (3.0) or "Bookmarks/Edit Bookmarks" (4.0). Highlight the Bookmark whose name you want to change. Then go to "Item/Properties" (3.0) or "Edit/Bookmark Properties" (4.0). A dialog box will pop up. In the "Name" field, type in a new title for the Bookmark. Click "OK." You can also reach this dialog box by right-clicking on a highlighted Bookmark and choosing "Properties." Sending a favorite or bookmark via e-mail    Internet Explorer 3.0 & 4.0     To send a Favorite via Outlook Express, click on the "Mail" button and select the "Send a Link" option. Then just choose the Favorite you want to send. To send a Favorite via another e-mail program, grab the link icon next to the address in the "Address" field and drag and drop it into the body of any e-mail message.    Navigator 3.0 & 4.0     Click on "Bookmarks," highlight the Bookmark you want to send, and then drag and drop the Bookmark's icon into the body of your e-mail message.     Importing bookmarks     If you want to change or upgrade your browser, but you don't want to lose your precious Bookmarks/Favorites, then download a bookmark-converter program. These shareware utilities allow you to create bookmark files that work independently of any browser and exchange bookmarks between 3.0 and 4.0 versions of Navigator and Internet Explorer. We recommend BookLock (which has been renamed ACQURL) and Bookmark Importer 1.1.     Reprinted in HP AT Home Magazine with permission. Yahoo! Internet Life, Oct 98	TOGGLE Editor's Note:     As you can see from the sources this list was compiled in 1998 with earlier versions of Internet Explorer and Netscape. The suggested command sequences still hold good for the later versions. The instructions above for IE 3&4 work in IE5 as described.     When I first started out on the Internet, with the @Home service and Internet Explorer 5, I discovered a Favorites List that was a yard and a half long and full of somebody else's favorites--not mine. This annoyed me so much that I NEVER--well almost NEVER--used it. I am sure the folks at Microsoft and, maybe, @Home thought they were doing me a big favor by providing this list, but I considered it just clutter and ignored it. Oh, I added a couple of items, but they were at the bottom of the list and out of sight so I was never inclined to go searching for them. It was simpler to start typing a website name on the browser's address line, have the Internet addresses come up as suggestions below the line and scroll down to the one I wanted and click on it.     Until I read this article, I hadn't even tried to delete anything. Oh, I had thought about it. You bet! But never researched it very hard. Who needed favorites? And besides, they were in the order entered, not even alphabetically arranged. Then it struck me. Why not try to drag and drop. Culling and Rearranging the List     First I deleted what I considered to be clutter, which was almost everything that Microsoft and @Home had suggested. I'll make my own list, thank you. Then I realized that the order in which they appear can be re-arranged by simply dragging and dropping the entries displayed within the Organize Favorites window.     For example, I had one labeled TOGGLE, leading to toggle.org, listed as a favorite--but it was away down the list. I wanted it to appear at or near the top of the list so I clicked on it to highlight it, then holding down the left mouse button I dragged it to the top of the list and released the mouse button--and there it was, first on the list. Now I have MY favorites at the top of the list where I can see them without having to scroll down the screen.     Even though I have shortened and rearranged the list, I may not use it that much. As I said above just typing a key word on the browser's address line brings up addresses I have used in the past and, usually, I can find what I want that way faster than I can by opening the Favorites window. We'll see how this works out.
Number 199 - December 1999