Saturday, November 01, 2008

links tip

Here's a tip I invented to supplement browser bookmarks:
if you have a web server, make and upload a page of simple text links to the sites you visit the most, and then set this page as the home page in your browser.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

There's no need to upload the page anywhere. Just place it in your local filesystem and refer to it thusly:

file:///Users/eolake/home.html

Yes, three slashes. Don't ask me about the rationale. That's just one of the many ways the URL concept is broken.

Anyway, this is faster than loading the page over the net.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Good idea.
This also works for people who don't have a web server.
(Though why you'd know how to make an HTML page and not have a web server I dunno. :-)

Anonymous said...

By the way, in Chrome this default page is automatically generated and kept uptodate based on the websites you visit the the most.

Alas, Chrome is not yet available for the Mac.

Alex said...

And Chrome keeps a thumbnail of the page, which makes it "large".

The advantage of keeping it on a server is to get at it from anywhere. For example when in a Hotel and you rent the PC.

The advantage of just text is for places like your cell phone.

My cell phone uses a different page, it has links to a data robot which tracks the times of the trains I commute on - imagine you can check train arrival time even on the bus.

They haven't ported Chrome to Brew enabled cell phones. Also GMail is only available for Java and not Brew. That's the only problem with Verizon, they went off standard on phone language.

Unknown said...

There are three slashes, because... there are two, plus one !

file:///Users/eolake/home.html is in fact a shorthand for file://localhost/Users/eolake/home.html

As for bookmarks, I just found a service called Twine, though I'm not yet sure whether I'll use it regularily.

Pascal [P-04referent] said...

I've done that years ago. Except, I've made it on my PC, and set it as my home page. [You can set a home page address that's not on the Net.]

Originally, it was just that, a simple text link page. Over time, I've shaped it into something very nice, tables, a background texture, icon-sized images for visual help...
Made/modded several images myself, as well. Maybe I'll blog some of them one day.

Never used a browser bookmark in my life. Too primitive. ;-)