I started to write a com­ment to the post Fear of (book­mark) com­mit­ment? Try I Need to Read This over on Sil­i­con Florist, but what I found myself writ­ing started get­ting longer and longer and I real­ized I might be bet­ter off shar­ing as a fully hyper­linked blog post.

Rick talks about tem­porar­ily book­mark­ing arti­cles for return­ing to later.  You prob­a­bly know the sort of thing: a long, but inter­est­ing look­ing arti­cle on Digg’s home­page that you do not cur­rently have time for, some cool video that a friend Twit­ters, a link to a pos­si­bly NSFW pic­ture via IM that you’d rather not chance look­ing at now.  They are all links you want to get back to (after work, when the boss isn’t around, or on a higher band­width con­nec­tion), but they are not nec­es­sar­ily links you want to keep for­ever and ever.

He goes on to intro­duce a Portland-based ser­vice (yeay, Port­land!) called I Need To Read This that fits that situation.

One par­tic­u­lar quote in the arti­cle jumps out at me:

In short, you can’t com­mit to sav­ing it to your book­marks because you’re not sure if it’s book­mark mate­r­ial, yet.

I am not sure I agree with this state­ment.  It sounds like I Need To Read This is a great ser­vice and I do not want to be the neg­a­tive get-offa-my-lawn guy, but I have been doing this tem­po­rary link sav­ing for years with noth­ing more than book­marks and a plu­g­ins I already use.  Here’s my secret: every­thing is book­mark mate­r­ial.  Or, at the very least, every­thing has book­mark poten­tial.

I have one spe­cial book­mark folder in my Fire­fox tool­bar called To Review.  Any­thing that looks inter­est­ing, but I do not have the time to read (or oth­er­wise am not in a sit­u­a­tion in which read­ing is advised), I add as a book­mark in the To Review folder.  All of the other book­marks and book­mark fold­ers are, as Rick says, “book­mark mate­r­ial.”  This one folder is the wild­card anything-goes folder.  To look at it like email, this is my inbox.  Book­marks can be deleted, Dugg, archived into other book­mark fold­ers, and what­not.  I even try to use the Inbox Zero method­ol­ogy against this folder so that its size does not get out of control.

The To Review folder is only half of the equa­tion.  If you are the sort of per­son who only uses one browser on one com­puter (i.e. you carry your lap­top every­where or only do com­puter work in a home office), you’re done.  You can stop read­ing here because every­thing you need is covered.

I hap­pen to be in a sit­u­a­tion where I have a Linux box at work, a Mac lap­top, and a Mac desk­top.  I end up hav­ing to syn­chro­nize my book­marks because of this.  I want my quick-search book­marks to always be around (i.e. “pow harry pot­ter” in the URL bar searches Powell’s for Harry Pot­ter books.) I want links to research required by my cur­rent work and per­sonal projects at hand.  For me, syn­chro­niz­ing is a given.  I guess I could be using Deli­cious — and do use it for really-really long-term book­marks — but I don’t use it for daily or secure stuff.  Per­son­ally, I use Fox­marks (soon to be Xmarks) because I’m a Fire­fox guy that has to go across oper­at­ing sys­tems.  Fox­marks makes sure that my To Review folder (as well as all other book­marks) stays in sync between all machines.  With this method, any­thing that shows up on an RSS feed at work that looks inter­est­ing but too in-depth to cover in a cof­fee break gets book­marked and synced for when I get home.  This is the syn­chro­nizer I hap­pen to use, but there are plenty out there.

A recent added bonus to Foxmarks/Xmarks is the new Safari plu­gin.  This syn­chro­nizes Fox­marks with Safari — and more impor­tantly, the iPhone.  It used to be that I had to go to a spe­cial myfox­marks web­site on the iPhone to get to these links, but now they sync as local book­marks.  It is also nice to still have the option to go to myfox­marks if I have not synced in a lit­tle while.

So that is my method of mark­ing things to read for later.  I can­not say “it doesn’t require a spe­cial plu­gin or book­marklet” because it does.  It just doesn’t require a spe­cial plu­gin beyond those that I already need to use for other pur­poses.  And get off my lawn!

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1. Am I going to have to write my own news reader?
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3. Ignite Port­land 4
4. Anathem & other great books I’m not reading
5. iPhoto books are cool

Tagged as: bookmarks, browsers, firefox, foxmarks, ineedtoreadthis, plugins