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):
- Add a bookmark – click this button to add a bookmark
- Modify the group
- Move the group
- Sort bookmarks in alphabetical order
- 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.
Seems to me that this can’t hold a candle to FoxMarks Bookmark Synchronizer add-on for Firefox.
Indeed, Foxmarks is more than del.icio.us!
BTW, i tried three times to import Firefox bookmarks and it failed all three times. Didn’t bother to sign up to their forum for this.
Nice and quick interface though!
Yep, my only online bookmarking now is link.opera.com. Why? It’s always updated and I never have to do anything.
I tried this site, and the way it provide the entire page to organize and place bookmarks, and the availability of the site icons seems quite unique.
I use social bookmarking sites to keep track of all the cool stuff I found on the internet. If I were to save these things in my Firefox bookmarks, it’d be a total mess.
Just name it, tag it, and optionally choose what picture you want to go with it.
See the result here: [bluedot.us]
This could be good for someone who haven’t picked a bookmark synchronization service, but I’m quite happy using a combination of del.icio.us and Google Browser Sync (see [alekdavis.blogspot.com] ). Tag-based navigation (in del.icio.us) is easy and it is integrated with the browsers (via extensions), so I do not have to open a separate page to view bookmarks. If I understand it correctly, to use Quick Bookmarks, you either need to go to their Web site, or continuously import/export bookmarks. If this is the case, it may be a bit of a hassle.
Hi Alek,
I think that the idea under QB is to avoid to use browser bookmarks manager, because browsers always uses a “tree” bookmark interface, while in QB you can dispose your bookmarks using the entire page space, and you can access to it more directly, without open folders in folders and so on.
Also you can have other features like better RSS feeds (more feeds integrated in one page), snapshots, keep notes on bookmarks and others.
If you use something like QB, you don’t necessary need browser bookmarks, and personally I don’t use browser bookmarks anymore.
QB will be your home page, and you will keep it always open as the first tab of your browser.
I switched to links.opera, since a few days. Nice enough.
That’s true, but they are kind of meant for different purposes. This is more geared towards serving as a homepage. Plus it has better control over viewing feeds than Foxmarks.
That’s what we thought as well, and why we thought it would be worth writing about the site. We hadn’t really seen something that worked quite like this.
That actually looks like a really nice service, and I haven’t heard of it before. I might have to try that out.
It is a really nice service, and hopefully they add more features over time.
Agreed. Original folder-based hierarchical bookmark structure is not optimal, but I wonder what my QB home page would look like if I had thousands of bookmarks. Don’t know, maybe it will look OK (haven’t tried it myself), but I really like tag-based navigation since I started to use it, so folders are not an issue for me any more. Also, I assume that to bookmark a page in QB, you need to switch to QB site, but, I guess (assuming that I’m correct about this) this can be fixed in future with an extension.
Anyway, as I said, QB can be a good solution for some. I wish they came about a year earlier.
At the moment, you can “install” a simple button in your browser (no plugins, simply a bookmark). When you click it, your are redirected to a QB page that allows to bookmark it (url and page title are already filled), then you are redirected to the original page.
That’s a good point. They launched amidst all of the other personal homepage solutions, and there is so much competition out there that they aren’t receiving much publicity. I really do think they are one of the more useful personal homepages though.
They have a Firefox extension that will let you bookmark pages without ever leaving the page.
Screenshot: [img85.imageshack.us]
(You can also drag the Blue Dot window around.)