Remembering Sites Of Interest
How to keep track of your internet wonderings

The 2 touted ways to remember where you have been are Both of these are provided for that purpose but neither of these provides the type of performance that you can get by "doing it yourself".

The first "problem" is rather obvious - both vendors load their Bookmarks (Favorites) with tons of advertising. If you delete the adds (well, certain adds anyway) they simply come right back. (Hey, that's pretty obnoxous.)

In addition, Favorites are stored in an inefficient and proprietary format which can not be read using Netscape.

However, the main problem is that you can't add comments to the links. When you do it yourself, you can provide a significant amount of explanation as to why you are recording this link. If fact, you can even add links to multiple pages within the site.

On most systems, when you open a browser, the first thing that happens is that it tries to connect to the internet and to display a page of adds. What a waste of time - wouldn't it be better if the browser opened and showed you someting you could use?

The first thing you need to do is to create a home page which will be stored on your system. (You should place an icon on your desktop that points to this page and/or set your browser's default page to point to this page. I do both.)

At the top of the page should be a list of the sites that you visit more than once per week.

The rest of the page should link to pages that YOU HAVE WRITTEN YOURSELF. That's right, instead of using the proprietary link management schemes provided by the browsers, you should generate your own link management system.

Well, how much html do you need to know in order to do this? The first line of the file should be Why? Because the AOL 7 browser will not interpret the tags unless it is there. (Both IE and Netscape work fine if it is missing.)

Then you need to understand that browsers reformat text to remove any formatting that you type in. Therefore, you use

in order to start a new line (br) or a new paragraph (p - skips 2 lines).

The next tag you need is the anchor tag. This is the tag that links text to another page.

<br><a href="http://www.somewhere.com/" target="_blank">Text You Click</a> Any additional notes The br says to start on a new line. target="_blank" causes the page to automatically open in a new browser window. This allows your index to always be available.

And that's it. All you need are 4 simple tags and you can generate you own, portable, fully commented, list of useful links.

Here is a template that you can use to get started. Just copy it to the clipboard and paste it into notepad. Then save the file as someName.html. In order to add a new link, simply copy the full url (address) from your browser and paste it between the double quotes. Then type in the link and comments as appropriate.

There is really only one feature which separates IE from Netscape - in IE you can right click a page and select View Source. This procedure opens the file in notepad. For pages which are stored on your computer, when you save the file, it actually replaces the file that you are currently browsing. All you have to do is to refresh the display (press F5) to see your changes.

Author: Robert Clemenzi - clemenzi@cpcug.org
URL: http:// cpcug.org / user / clemenzi / technical / BrowserWars / RememberingSitesOfInterest.html