Until literally a couple months ago, I had never used bookmarks in any incarnation of any browser. It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to use bookmarks, but that the implementation in most browsers was crappy. Even when the implementation wasn’t too shabby, a) most systems were useless once you got past a few hundred bookmarks and b) synchronizing between multiple machines was a pain.
So for the last decade or so, if there has been a site I wanted to re-visit, I’d typically just add it to this weblog or simply Google for it.
But I finally drank the bookmark Kool Aid when Michael VanPutten introduced me to SiteBar.Org.
SiteBar is a Web 2.0 application that lets you manage bookmarks online. SiteBar displays and lets you manage bookmarks directly in the browser. With a nice Firefox plugin, it shows up as a sidebar in Firefox that can be toggled on and off. And, of course, I can now access it on any of the several different computers I may use in the course of a day.
SiteBar.Org is free for up to 500 links, but you have to pay a nominal fee if you want to go beyond that. I don’t quite have 500 links but paid the Euro 11.88 yearly fee anyway to get access to the SSL-encrypted version.
And if you’re not comfortable storing your bookmarks on someone else’s server, simply download the GPLed server software that runs SiteBar and install it on your own box.
All-in-all an excellent example of a single purpose software that does one task and does it extremely well.