Here at Make Tech Easier, we have discussed several options to save your favorite internet destinations. Each has their own special feature or niche they service. Some are video related, some are more visual, others are text based. Weloxy lets you organize your link icons into different groupings.

Many of you may be thinking: “Why should I use a website to keep my bookmarks since my browser already does that?”. There are several reasons you can use a web-based bookmarking system. Access from anywhere is one of the best reasons.

When you have many or all of your bookmarks stored online, you are not tied to a specific browser or even a certain computer. As long as you have a computer and internet access, you can visit your sites. Below is a quick tutorial on how to set up Weloxy.

When you start up an account with Weloxy, you will see something like this.

The start screen is pretty basic really, just few icons in a box. The default links are pretty common sites. You can edit what is displayed in the default box. You will need to click on Enter Page Setup in the top left under your name.

You will see a slightly different screen and options. In the Page Setup screen, you have a lot of control over how your links are grouped together. As you can imagine, having different groups of easily accessible links can make finding your favorite site a lot easier.

When editing your page, you can drag and drop the links into different spots within a block as well as move them from one block to another.

You can reorder the blocks in a very similar way. By clicking on Reorder blocks, the screen will refresh giving you the chance to rearrange the blocks in an order that makes sense to you.

You could have a social media group, a job hunting group and even a group of links to the video game forums you frequent.

The more popular sites will already be in the Weloxy database. These links will have a logo associated with them. If the site you are looking to add is not in their database, you can add a link of your own.

The links you add cannot currently be associated with a logo. instead, you have 10 characters to name your link.

Having the blocks of links is a good way to organize all of the links into different groups, making what you want easier to find. What I would like to see is some sort of import option and maybe a way to pull in the favicon from the sites. Even though it is pretty easy to add a link into your Weloxy page, pictures are sometimes spot the site you are looking for more quickly.

Do you save your bookmarked links in your browser or on the web somewhere? Tell us where in the comments.

Weloxy

Locations

The most traditional way of accessing files in KDE is to go directly to the location of the file. The most obvious approach for direct location access is to use the file manager – Dolphin. By clicking on the breadcrumb location bar anywhere after the last letter, Dolphin will give you the option to edit the location manually by typing it into the location bar. You can also do this in all KDE file dialogs.

All KDE location bars support traditional Unix paths, including “~” for the home folder. By using the “.”, it is also an easy way to access hidden folders. If you type in the full path of a file, KDE will open the file with the appropriate helper application.

KDE’s kio-slave protocols are also accepted in the location bar. For example, if you type, “remote:/” you will see the available networks and network folders you have created. If you type “programs:/”, you will see the categories for all applications in your menu.

Places

“Places” in KDE are a set of shortcuts to folders and removable media on your computer. By default, the Places panel is found on the left-hand side of Dolphin. You can add folders to Places by dragging them over to the panel or by right clicking and then clicking “Add Entry”.

In addition to Dolphin, KDE file dialogs also use the same Places, making it easy to access the files you want to open or save. The Kickoff and Lancelot menus also display the same places, and the shelf widget can be configured to show them as well.

Like the rest of KDE, Places support shortcuts to kio-slaves. Therefore, you can have quick access to network folders, the trash, Nepomuk searches, and much more.

Bookmarks

One of the file access features that is not immediately apparent in KDE is the “bookmark” tool. With it, you can easily create additional shortcuts to locations you frequently use in addition to those listed in Places.

Bookmarks is primarily available in KDE file dialogs, allowing you to configure quick access bookmark folders for specific applications. Like a web browser, you can bookmark any location in the KDE file dialog by clicking the star icon and “Add Bookmark”, or by pressing Ctrl+B. From then on, anytime you want to quickly access a frequently used location not listed in Places, you can click on the star and bring up your list of bookmarks.

Just as Locations and Places can make use of kio-slaves, Bookmarks can use them too. This means you can quickly save to remote network locations, something particularly useful for using applications like Kate to edit remote scripts and websites.

Other Tools

With the breadcrumbs feature enabled in Dolphin, you can drag and drop files into any one of the breadcrumb spots to easily copy or move files. If you drag and drop into a text editor, it will display the full path to the location in text form.

Another helpful way to easily copy files is to right click on any file and move your mouse pointer to “Copy to”. This will open a sub-menu, giving you the ability to choose the location you want. When you find the folder you want, click “Copy Here”. If this feature is not enabled by default, simply open the Dolphin preferences, click “General”, choose the “Context Menu” tab, and then tick the “Show ‘Copy To’…” checkbox.

With any location, you can access it with Krunner by pressing Alt+F2 and then typing in the location. This includes remote network locations and even website URLs.

KDE supports dragging and dropping of files, folders, and even remote locations across its own applications and even works with some non-KDE applications. With full control over how you access your files and folders, you should be able to use KDE exactly the way you want.

New Interface

Firefox 4 has gone through a big design change. The first thing that you will notice is the replacement of the menu bar with a menu button (currently only available in WIndows and Mac version). The new big orange menu button is located on the very top left corner of the browser, and when clicked, will open up a compact menu window. While I don’t really like the orange color and the location that it is situated, I do welcome the idea of replacing the menu bar with the button. It makes the browser more clean and compact.

Note: The orange button in the nightly build comes with a two column menu layout, so the screenshot above will probably not be the layout in the final version.

Another visual change is the change of the tab bar to above the address bar – the same way as in Google Chrome. The Mozilla team even done up a video to explain why the tab bar is on top. For those who prefer the old design, you would be glad that there is an option for you to switch the tab bar back to below the address bar.

Other visual changes include:

• bookmark bar been replaced by a bookmark button
• The Stop/Reload button merged to one button

App Tab

This is one new feature that I like while testing the beta. You can now change your tab into an app tab and park it permanently in your tab bar. Just think of it as a “dock” in the tab bar.

When a tab is converted to an app tab, the tab will shrink to show only the favicon. It will also move itself to the left hand corner of the tab bar. Whenever you start your browser, these app tabs will be loaded and you will have access to your favorite site instantly.

There is one caveat though. If you have too many app tabs, your browser might take some time (and system resources) to load itself up. Not a good idea if you just want to quickly check some information from the Web.

Panorama

This is probably the best feature in Firefox 4. I would even call it revolutionary. Panorama provides a new way for you to organize your tabs. It is mainly useful for those who like to have plenty of tabs opened.

What Panorama does is allow you to sort your tabs in groups. You can drag and drop related tabs to form a group and you can create as many groups as you want. For example, you can have an Email groups where it contains the login page of all your email accounts. You can also create another group that contains all your social network page, or if you doing research, a group that contains information from various sites. At any point of time, only one group is active and all the tabs in that group will be visible in the browser.

There is also some eye candy built into the Panorama feature. When you click on the Panorama button, located on the top right hand corner, all your groups will fly out in the Mac’s Expose style. Awesome!

Firefox Sync

We have previously discussed the Firefox Sync extension that you can install to sync your Firefox profile and settings across various computers. The good thing is, this is now included as default in Firefox 4. Simply go to “Options -> Sync” to setup the Sync.

New about:addons page

The addons manager is now moved to a new page, accessible with the about:addons URL. This new addons management area is also given a design overhaul.

Supports for HTML 5, CSS3, WebM format and full WebGL support

Firefox 4 now comes with native support for HTML 5, CSS3 and the WebM format. It might take some time for the whole Web to adopt these new standard, but it is good to see that Firefox is already providing support for them.

Search for and switch to opened tabs in smart bar

The Mozilla team is continuing to make improvement to the address bar. If you have plenty of tabs opened, you can now easily search for your tabs in the smart bar (which is actually the address bar) and switch to the tab easily. Nice move.

Crash protection for Flash, Quicktime and Silverlight

This is a crash protection for Flash, Quicktime and Silverlight. You should see lesser occurrence of a crash in the Flash player bringing the whole browser down.

Firefox 4 beta 4 is now available for download and testing. You can download it here.

Another great thing about browser bookmarklets is that they don’t hog down your system’s memory because they are invoked only when you use them. Else, they sleep silently in your bookmarks toolbar.

While it is easy to add multiple bookmarklets to your browser, managing them can be an painful task. You have to search the desired bookmarklet from the bookmarks toolbar and repetedly click the folder containing the bookmarklets. Not to mention the valuable screen real estate taken up by the bookmarklets.

In this tutorial, we will learn how you can combine and concatenate multiple browser bookmarklets into one and use all of them without having to clutter your bookmarks toolbar. Moreover, you can share the bookmarklet collection with anyone and can use it from any computer you want.

How to Combine Multiple Browser Bookmarklets

1. First backup your existing bookmarks and bookmarklets as an HTML file. This will be handy if you want to revert to the older settings.

2. Go to the Bookmarklet Combiner website. You will see the following interface:

3. Now you have to copy the address property of a bookmarklet and paste it in the URL field in the Bookmarklet combiner website. To find the address property of a bookmarklet, right click it and select properties

4. This will open a small pop up window containing the location and other properties of the bookmarklet, as shown below:

Copy the entire code shown in the “Location” field of the boomarklet.

5. Paste the code in the Bookmarklet Combiner website’s URL field. I have combined three bookmarklets in the following example, you can simply click the “Add Another” button to add a row and then enter the address of a new bookmarklet.

Make sure you enter a relevant title for the bookmarklet because this will be required to identify a bookmarklet from a crowd of many.

6. Now you have to select an action which will be triggered once you hit the combined bookmarklet button. You have two choices here:

• Run all the bookmarklets at once. This may be required when you want to perform multiple actions on a webpage by clicking a single button. For example – you can combine Tweet this, Digg This, Stumble it bookmarklets into one and click the combined bookmarklet to share a webpage instantly on these social bookmarking sites. Hitting this bookmarklet will automatically open three new browser tabs and all you have to do is sign in and take the required action.
• The second option is however much better – it allows you to select individual bookmarklets from the drop down list. Thus you have to click the drop down list each time you want to invoke a bookmarklet.

If you are a power user, go for the first option and combine groups of bookmarklets that solve similar purpose. If you are no geek and want an easy option to merge multiple bookmarklets and declutter your bookmarks toolbar, go for the second option.

7.  In the next step, specify a location where you would want to save the bookmarklet in your bookmarks toolbar.

You can also name your bookmarklet, this will be useful when you are dealing with different sets of bookmarklets as mentioned earlier.

8. You are all done. Hit “Save” and the combined bookmarklet will be saved in your bookmarks toolbar. You will also be given a Unique URL containing all the address of the combined bookmarklet ( see example)

Here is how it works when you hit the combined bookmarklet:

You can share the bookmarklet combination with anyone by sending them the URL. This is also useful in the sense that you don’t have to backup or export anything, a copy is stored in the Bookmarklet combiner website. When you are working over a friend’s house or on an internet cafe, simply open that URL and drag the bookmarklet combination in your bookmarks toolbar. Neat !

Also check out some useful Greasemonkey scripts which you can use to enhance your browsing environment.

What are the browser bookmarklets you use or recommend ? Please share your ideas in the comments section.

The basic idea behind Packrati.us is to capture all of the links you talk about on Twitter.

Many people have a Twitter account. Most are using it to tell people what they are doing or chat back and forth. As these people get the hang of how easy it is to share information and sites of interest, it can be hard to keep track of all that information.

Delicious Bookmarks is site designed to help keep all of the websites you like or find useful, all in one location. Having your bookmarks stored online is a really handy for several reasons. Being able to access them from any computer or web enabled phone, subscribing to other peoples bookmarks and being able to link to a specific tag are just a few reasons to consider Delicious bookmarks.

So when you combine both Twitter and Delicious bookmarks, you got Packrati.us.

Where to Start

Sign in to your Twitter account via the Packrati.us site.

Follow Packrati.us on Twitter

If you have a newer Delicious account, you can sign into Yahoo. If you have an “old school” Delicious account, sign in with your user name and password.

What Happens Next

Once you are logged in, you can adjust your preferences. In these settings, you can add default tags, remove tags, bookmark links in @mentions to you to name some.

Time to Save

Now that everything is all set to go, all you need to do is tweet like normal. When you RT someone or post an update with a link in it, that link will automatically be saved to your Delicious bookmarks. Every link saved this way will have the tag [via:packrati.us].

Caution

Depending on your Tweeting habits and how organized you like to keep your Delicious bookmarks, this mashup can really get out of hand. I will admit i don’t have the most organized bookmarks, but I do like to use certain tags so I can find things later.

Something I am not sure I like is having EVERYTHING with a link saved. For example, I use a mashup (lastfmlovetweet.com) to tweet the songs I “love” when I am listening to Last.fm.

It saves the song with the #love and #lastfm hashtags as the Delicious tags.

Granted it is easy enough to search for these tags and delete the song links, it would be really cool in a future update to have a way to filter out certain sites or tags. The only option is to save tweets which include a user defined hashtag. Not that is a big deal, other sites (Facebook #fb and Linkedin #li) allow updates using this as well. It would be nice to see a filter working the opposite way considering the main use is to pack away pretty much everything you tweet.

Does automatically saving the links you tweet save you time?

In your iPhone, open the safari app.

On the address bar, enter www.stumbleupon.com/toolbar

That’s it. The StumbleUpon toolbar will appear and it immediately stumbles you to one of its pages.

To stumble through websites, simply tap on the Stumble button, like how you always did on your computer browser.

Adding to bookmarks

To save the effort of having to retype the URL everytime, you can save the SU toolbar in your bookmark.

Everytime when you access the StumbleUpon toolbar, it will start stumbling and append the destination URL to its own, resulting in an URL like http://www.stumbleupon.com/toolbar/#2LpQMi/maketecheasier.com/8-useful-and-interesting-bash-prompts/2009/09/04/topic:Linux%2FUnix.

I am sure you won’t want to save this long URL in your bookmark, unless you want to save this particular page for future reference.

Here’s how you can change it.

On any StumbleUpon page, click the + at the bottom screen to save the current URL to Bookmark.

Change the title to StumbleUpon (or any name you like). Note that you won’t be able to change the URL here.

Save to Bookmark.

Back in the Bookmark screen, tap on the Edit (at the bottom left corner) button.

Press the StumbleUpon bookmark entry to go into Edit mode.

Change the URL to www.stumbleupon.com/toolbar. Save.

That’s it. Everytime you launch this bookmark, it will start stumbling.

Personally, I  found that using StumbleUpon on my iPhone drained my battery much faster than normal browsing. I am not sure if it is only me, or this is a SU issue. If you have such issues too, feel free to voice it out in the comments.

1. Foxmarks/Xmarks

Type: Browser Extension (Firefox, IE, Safari)

Saves: Bookmarks, Passwords

Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks) is a browser extension that allows you to synchronize bookmarks from several locations so that they can follow you anywhere. It used to be a Firefox-only extension, but now has extend its reach to Internet Explorer and Safari. The website has a type of content search where you can see reviews and ratings for many web sites based on the users of the Xmarks extension. With the Xmarks extension installed, you’ll also notice some new icons next to your Google search results indicating ratings and reviews for some of the sites in your search results.

Xmarks also includes an option to sync your saved passwords, so that you can keep the passwords saved in one browser and share them to all the others where you installed Xmarks.

To install the Xmarks extension, go to http://download.xmarks.com/download and choose the appropriate plugin for your browser.

2. delicious

Type: Browser Extension (Firefox, Internet Explorer 8, Safari, Chrome)

Saves: Bookmarks

Any topic on web bookmark services will always eventually lead to http://delicious.com/ (previously known as del.icio.us). This site has been around for a while and has always been a great place to store and share your bookmarks. Delicious also allows you to tag your bookmarks with keywords, so that you can search your (or other people’s) bookmarks based on tags. From the website you can search with those tags to see what bookmarks others have submitted on that topic.

The browser extension for Firefox can be found here.

The browser extension for IE8 can be found here

The browser extension for Safari can be found here

For Google Chrome, go to the delicious site and drag the bookmarklet to the bookmark bar.

3. Mozilla Weave

Type: Browser Extension (Firefox)

Saves: Bookmarks, browsing history, saved passwords and tabs

Finally, there’s Mozilla Weave. This is a much more ambitious project than just saving your bookmarks online. Weave is intended to let you keep a complete browser “experience” from one computer to the next. It saves much more info online so that you can access things like your browsing history and tabs along with bookmarks and passwords when roaming to a different Firefox installation. Keeping things like your browser history saved online would make it a lot easier to access that page-you-were-on-yesterday-but-can’t-quite-remember-the-name, or pull up that news article you just saw but isn’t on the site’s front page anymore.

Weave appears to be a very useful tool, but unfortunately it seems to require Firefox 3.5, which is still in development. If you’re really excited to try out Weave but don’t want to wait until 3.5 is officially released as stable, you can get information on download and installation at the Mozilla Labs website.

There are some other options out there that I chose not to include in this article for various reasons such as platform portability or concerns about data privacy. If you’re using a bookmark sync program/extension to manage your bookmarks, I’d like to hear about your experiences in the comments below.

Speedtile is a powerful web bookmarking site that allows you to organize your bookmarks with tile preview and sort them in different categories. It also comes with many other features such as bookmarks sharing and screenshots preview of bookmarked sites.

1. Easily bookmark with rich tile preview option

When you bookmark a site on Speedtile, it will immediately make a screenshot of the site and display it as an awesome glossy look tile. When you mouse over the tile, it will show a Vista-like glow which make it very intuitive to navigate around your pool of bookmarks. It also comes with an intelligent bookmarking solution that prevent you from bookmarking the same sites twice.

2. Share your favorite bookmarks with others

Each tile comes with a tool icon that allows you to share your bookmark. Shared bookmarks will have a ribbon added to the tile and the URL will be shown on a public site. Not all the bookmarks are shared by default. You have to manually select the tile that you want to share.

3. Get the screen shot of all the bookmarked sites

This the most interesting feature, speedtile actually takes a screen shot of a website and places it in the tile. The screenshot can also be viewed separately or be saved as an image. On the top right corner of the tile, click on the “zoom icon” to view the screen shot of the webpage.

4. Manage Bookmarks easily by organizing into categories

Speedtile allows you to create categories and sort your bookmarks to their respective category. You can move a bookmark from one category to another just by using “drag and drop” option.

5. Instantly bookmark with Firefox plug-in

Speedtile provides a handy Firefox plug-in for easy bookmarking in Firefox. Install the plug-in. Right click on the browser and select the option “Bookmark with speedtile “ whenever you wish to bookmark a site.

6. View tiles by order to locate bookmark

If you have plenty of bookmarks in a single category, you can easily sort the bookmarks with the “order by” option. Sorting options include last modification, most visited, sort by date and alphabetical order.

Conclusion

Considering that Speedtile is free to use and is available as an extension to Firefox, it could provide that alternative method to manage your bookmarks in style. What’s I find still missing in speedtile is the ability to import and export your bookmarks, which I believe the developers will include in the future.

If you have used Speedtile, share your experience with us in the comments.

First part – What’s new in Ubuntu 9.04
Second part – How to upgrade from ext3 to ext4 without formatting the hard disk
Third part – 9 things you need to install after installing Ubuntu Jaunty
Fourth part – Download Ubuntu Installation guide and cheatsheet

In the fifth and the last part of the series, we are going to recommend to you some of the useful Ubuntu-related websites that you should bookmark and reference to regularly.

1) Ubuntuforums

Needless to say, the best place to go for Ubuntu support is none other than the popular Ubuntu Forums. This is the only place where you can find all kind of advices, tips and tricks, hacks and solutions related to Ubuntu. If there is a Ubuntu-related problem that you can’t solve, most likely it has already been discussed in the forums.  Simply do a search in the forums or post your question and you will receive plenty of help from the community.

2) Ubuntu Guide

As its name implies, UbuntuGuide is a wiki where you can find plenty of guide, tips and tricks for Ubuntu. It covers information from Ubuntu Dapper to Jaunty and is available in multiple languages. While UbuntuForums is a great means to get solutions for your problems, UbuntuGuide is the place to go to find new tricks and apply them in your system.

3) Ubuntu Hardware Support List

While Ubuntu supports a wide range of devices, there are still times when you can’t get a particular hardware to work. The Hardware Support page shows a hardware compatibility list that you can refer to before you make any hardware purchase. This hardware support page is maintained by the community and anyone can add/modify the entry.

4) Ubuntu Documentation

It is no doubt that Ubuntu is an easy to use and user-friendly distro. However, if you are still having difficulties navigating around and get it to perform simple daily tasks, you can head on to Ubuntu Documentation and read about everything you need to know about Ubuntu. It won’t make you an expert, but at least it can help you to get started (and perhaps show your friends how geeky you are).

5) Launchpad

Launchpad is the place for you to discover new open-source applications or retrieve source code/installation instruction for third party apps that are not found in the Ubuntu repositories.

6) Gnome-look.org

If you love eye-candy, beautiful wallpapers, login screen, splash screen and everything about your Ubuntu system, then gnome-look.org is the place to visit. It contains a great collection of artworks and themes contributed by the community. They are free to download and use.

Kubuntu and Xubuntu users can check out kde-look.org and xfce-look.org respectively.

7) Ubuntu Brainstorm

Ubuntu Brainstorm is a Digg-like site where you can submit your ideas/suggestions/stuffs to be included in future version of Ubuntu and let others vote for it. Popular ideas (those that received a lot of votes) are reviewed by the Ubuntu team and possibly include them in the future release.

8) Full Circle Magazine

Full Circle Magazine is the only website that is dedicated to publish a free Ubuntu magazine (in pdf format) every month. Being a loyal subscriber, I have found their magazines very informative, yet doesn’t get too technical in detail. It is great for new users who wanted to learn more about Ubuntu.

9) Ubuntu Seach Engine

A Google custom search engine dedicated to search only Ubuntu-related stuffs. Currently it indexes 169 Ubuntu-related sites, including UbuntuForums, Ubuntu Wiki and Ubuntu Guide.

Other dedicated Ubuntu search engine that you can go to include Ubuntu-Search and Ubuntu Wire.

10) Planet Ubuntu

Planet Ubuntu is a blog written and updated regularly by Ubuntu developers and contributors. This is where you can get the latest and updated news about your system.

What other sites do you visit for your Ubuntu needs?

Image credit: Kartihksn