I spent a few minutes today rebuilding my sidebar in Firefox. I figured it was worth spending 20 minutes or so to save myself hours and hours over the next 12 months. My steps included:
- Adding/Removing/Organizing my folders into how I use the web
- Weeding out all the sites and links I never visit anymore (there were more than 3 dozen)
- Going through, folder by folder, and adding/moving the bookmarks around and changing the title tags to be short and sweet (that way, the sidebar takes up less horizontal space)
- Toughest part – sorting all the dozens of blogs I read by priority and importance/relevance to me
- Creating a few new bookmarklets (Graywolf’s list was good, but I needed a few more)
- Going into all the admin sections of the tools I visit and bookmarking those (so I don’t have to remember them all)
So now, I’ve got something cool like this:
And, since I’m the kind of guy who shares way, way, way too much (believe it or not, I actually wanted that for our tagline for a while), I figured I’d go overboard and give you a list of what’s in all of my bookmark folders (well, OK, just the first 7):
I’ve actually taken the time to order these from most favorite to least (or most important to least) as well as categorize, but don’t read too much into that – it’s just my personal taste:
- Social Buzz
- Reddit – my favorite of the social media trackers, even if it is the hardest to market with.
- Del.icio.us/Popular
- StumbleUpon Buzz Tracker
- TechMeme (I know, I know.. technically, it’s not social)
- Digg – least favorite (even though it’s important for work, the content that shows up there is pretty “ugh” right now)
- PopURLs (for when I’m lazy)
- Blogs
- Forums
- News
- Search
- Bookmarklets (this is the good one – drag these to your sidebar for the effect)
- Keyword Research
I’d love it if folks would share their own tips for sidebar/toolbar optimization in the browser. If you’ve got some great ideas or sites that I’ve foolishly overlooked in any of these categories, it would be very cool to list them below – feel free to link out, too.
p.s. Sorry I can’t share my tools or articles stuff – even I have to draw the competitive advantage line somewhere 🙂
Update: Caydel created a downloadable version of all these so you can import them if you feel like sharing bookmarks with me 🙂
