Skloog – Visual Bookmarking and More

Trevor Dobrygoski — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 13:00:35 +0000

There are a lot of web-based applications these days. It seems like when you get used to one, another one pops up just a little cooler than the one you are using. I say that to say this: Skloog is a really easy to use bookmarking site.

I have written about a few bookmarking sites here on Make Tech Easier. Bookmarking sites like 43marks, myHomepage and Symbaloo. All of them have their pros and cons. Skloog has a list of features that others didn’t have at the time of writing those articles.

Sign up

You will need to set up an account. This is allows you to personalize your bookmarks and gives you a Skloog email address, more on that later. Setting up an account only takes a minute. Name, email address and password are all that’s required. You will need to activate your account by clicking on the link they email you.

Emailing a link

Being able to email a link into a bookmarking site is not a feature many sites offer. When you sign up for an account, they will issue you an email address. This email address is a direct path to creating a new bookmark without going to the site and logging in.

The process is what you would think it would be. Compose and email with 1 or more links and send it to your assigned email address. I like this option because you can send in a bunch of links at one time.

Importing to Skloog

Skloog lets you import the bookmarks you already have. This was a feature some of the others sites left out. In my opinion, it makes switching much more difficult if you need to start from scratch.

You have your choice of a few browsers and sites to import from. I like how they chose to include importing from Xmarks. For all of people who are using this soon to be extinct Firefox plug-in, this is a great way to capture all of your bookmarks.

Currently you cannot export your bookmarks from Skloog, however the feature is coming. It says so on the bottom of the bookmark importing page.

Finding your bookmarks

Once you have all of your bookmarks imported into Skloog, you have a couple of ways to track them down. You can use the search bar off to the left side of the page. The other way is to search using the category drop down.

Organizing your bookmarks

Organizing your bookmarks is pretty easy. You have the choice to use categories, tags or both. If you are adding a new bookmark manually, you can add all this information into the fields after you click Add A Bookmark in the left sidebar of the main screen.

If you import bookmarks from a browser or email a link to Skloog, you sill need to click on the My Bookmarks tab and add tags or categories manually. You can bulk add categories by clicking the box to the left of the bookmark, then clicking where is says Move to and selecting the category from the drop down.

Other notable features

I like bookmarklets. they make life easier for quick things like adding a bookmark. Skloog offers 2 different bookmarklets; one for adding a bookmark and the other takes you to your Skloog homepage.

The bookmarks displayed on the main page can be personalized to your favorite sites. You can then set Skloog to be your homepage.

The tabs just above the visual bookmarking window can be personalized giving you layers of organized bookmarks. If you use Skloog as your homepage, this will help the page seem less cluttered.

What would you add to make this your ideal bookmarking service?

Skloog – Visual Bookmarking and More originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)
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Three Easy Ways to Synchronize Your Bookmarks Across Various Browsers

Joshua Price — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 12:33:30 +0000

Like many of you, I use a LOT of different computers. Some at home, some at work, some in between. Many of these computers have more than one operating system installed, and those operating systems may have more than one browser. All this leaves a LOT of places you may have saved your bookmarks. What’s saved on one might not be saved on another, or perhaps you reformatted your OS and forgot to backup your favorite websites. Fortunately, there are a multitude of ways to solve this problem, and today we’ll be covering some of them. Each of the programs/toolbars/extensions we’ll try out today can store your bookmarks outside your browser so that they can be accessed from anywhere.

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.

Three Easy Ways to Synchronize Your Bookmarks Across Various Browsers originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)
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