CyberNotes: Remove Broken and Duplicate Bookmarks

Web Browser Wednesday

I’m not sure about you, but I have a collection of bookmarks that is almost unmanageable. Some of the bookmarks I probably haven’t touched for years, and I thought it was time for a little spring winter cleaning!

So I started browsing around looking for a utility that would assist me in the daunting chore. Sure there are Firefox extensions out there that can check for duplicate bookmarks and look for dead links, but all of my bookmarks aren’t in Firefox alone. I needed something a little more universal.

That’s when I stumbled across a free Windows-only program called AM-DeadLink. It’s a nifty little tool that can check your Internet Explorer, Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, and Opera bookmarks for both dead links and duplicate entries. This would really be a killer application if it didn’t require any installation, but I’ll take what I can get.

–Dead Links–

If you’re a bookmarking fanatic you probably have some pretty ancient sites saved that don’t even exist anymore. Just startup AM-DeadLink, select your browser, and click the green button with the checkmark in it. The app will begin scanning all of your bookmarks 10 at a time (number of concurrent connections is adjustable in the settings), and it will alert you of its findings:

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The nice thing is that it will ignore local bookmarks and bookmarklets which would likely return an error. You’ll also notice that it points out when a bookmark is redirected to another site. Unfortunately there is no option to automatically update the address of all the redirected bookmarks, but that might be a nice feature for the developer to add in the future.

If you find a broken bookmark that you want to delete you don’t have to worry about opening the browser to remove it. Just select the bookmark from the list (Ctrl+Click to select multiple bookmarks), and then click on the Recycling Bin button located at the end of the toolbar.

–Duplicate Bookmarks–

There is an option located on the toolbar that will filter out all of the displayed bookmarks except for those that have duplicates. This is great for finding those sites you’ve bookmarked one too many times:

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–And More–

AM-DeadLink has a few other features as well, such as the ability to download favicons for all of the websites in your bookmarks. If you find that the browser doesn’t have a lot of favicons for your bookmarks this is a fast and easy way to do it yourself.

And since your bookmarks are so important it only makes sense that the app lets you back them all up. In just a few clicks they will be saved to your computer in a compressed ZIP file.

–Overview–

In the end AM-DeadLink managed to hunt down 23 dead links and 6 duplicates in my hundreds of bookmarks. It might not be a huge amount, but I thought that I did a good enough job managing my bookmarks that it would have a hard time finding anything wrong with them. Guess everyone should clean “house” once in awhile!

Download AM-DeadLink (Windows only, requires installation)