Bookmark manager

WHILE BROWSING the web, quite often you come across sites that are worth visiting frequently. But it is practically difficult to remember the addresses of all these web sites. To solve this problem, popular browsers allow you to save the links in your hard disk in a specified location and format; how this is done depends on the browser. The list of links formed this way is known as Favorites in IE and Bookmark in Netscape. Though the browsers themselves have some tools to organise/manage the bookmarks/favorites that help you to comfortably access them, they have some shortcomings. A set of tools/services that lets you manage bookmarks rather efficiently is discussed here.When you become a frequent Net traveller, you bookmark will increase rapidly and with the present tools available with the browsers, you have to make an effort to locate a particular link.

As each browser has its own strategy to organise and store bookmarks, when you switch from one browser to the other you will lose your access to the bookmarks available with the old browser.

In your bookmark that is stored in your PC, you may have wonderful web links; but you will not be able to use them when you operate on a different computer to access the Net.

Just because you added one link to your favorite/bookmark, it does not mean that you will use it everyday. Perhaps you may come back to it after six months - but what is the guarantee that the site is still live?Perhaps your bookmark may contain sites that may be useful to your colleagues and you may be keen to share the bookmark with them automatically, which is not possible with the bookmark features supported by most of the present browsers.Having seen varied bookmark requirements of a serious netizen, now we will examine some utilities/services available in the Net that help you minimise the above deficiencies of the bookmark tool that comes along with the popular browsers.

itList

itList is a free web service that allows you upload the bookmarks from your browser to the Net so that they can be accessed from anywhere at anytime. Besides, the service provides you the option to keep your bookmarks open for others, that is, you can share your favorite links with others automatically. To avail yourself of the service, access the site itlist.com/join-tng.cgi and register with it. After registering, move to the setup page, log- in to the site and start importing the bookmarks from your browser. Once the bookmarks are uploaded, the links can be accessed by logging-in to the service or directly through the link of the form itlist.com/Users/your-name (your-name is your account's log-in name).

BookmarkSync

The Net can be used from different machines and also through different browsers. Whatever be the access route to the Net, when you find some good sites worth keeping in the 'favorites' database, you immediately bookmark it. But as discussed earlier, a bookmark stored in IE will not be available to Netscape; also, the bookmarks made in one machine will not be automatically available in another machine. What is needed is a mechanism to make available automatically all the bookmarks made by a user whenever, wherever and however it is created to all the machines/browsers he/she has access. The program BookmarkSync meets this challenge quite remarkably. You have to first install the utility available at bookmarksync.com/.

Once installed and run, the program's icon will be available at the system tray. When you bookmark a link using IE or Netscape, the utility automatically transmits this link to its server, keeps it there and transmits this information back to all of your local browsers. If you use more than one machine, you may install the program in all the machines and by logging-in to the server with the same account you can keep the bookmarks same in all the machines automatically. If you are on the move and want to access the favorites on-line, just login to the BookmarkSync site in your account.

Check&Get

As mentioned in the beginning, some of the links in your 'favorites' collection will have gone dead by the time you try to revisit it. Check&Get is an intelligent bookmark manager that scans the bookmark links for new content and alerts you when it finds new changes - so, without visiting the web pages, you will have access to information on them. What is described here is just one of the features of this free but advertisement supported program. The ability to search and sort the bookmarks, the preview window that lets a user quickly locate his/her favorite web site and the like are some of the other highlights of this software that is available at activeurls.com/.

Apart from the services discussed above, there are many other bookmark managers and services available. Some of them are: One view (oneview.com), Powermarks (kaylon.com/power.html) and Bookmark converter (magnusbrading.com/bmc/).

Star Office Suite

The story on 'Copyleft' that was featured in this column two weeks ago, evoked mixed response from readers - many strongly supporting the same and some opposing the 'free' concept. In this regard, two readers brought to my attention the free open-source software - Star Office Suite - from Sun Microsystems. Though I knew about this program, I did not try it out so far; but these letters (from Mr. Rejin and Mr. Muthu) prompted me to examine the features of this program. Most readers must be familiar with Microsoft's Office software. Star Office, which has got almost all the features of Office 2000, is the one definitely worth trying. The program has many components such as Star Office Writer - similar to Word, Calc - similar to Excel; Base the database module, Draw - the module for creating drawings; Impress - the component that helps you make presentations; Discussion - the module that enables you read newsgroups, and Math - the module that helps you create/edit formulae. This completely free product, which can be a formidable challenge to the MS-Office, can be downloaded from the site sun.com/products/staroffice. Please note that the size of the program is quite large (80 MB) compared to the usual programs featured in this column and perhaps dial-up users may experience some difficulty in downloading the software.

Plight of a free e-mail user

The author received a letter from a reader describing his distressing experience with the e-mail service Rediff.com. It seems, an unknown person (posing as Mr. Srinivas) managed to obtain Mr. Srinivas Reddy Kolli's 'rediffmail' account's password from the service provider simply by writing a few mails to the service's 'customer service'. Mr. Srinivas' letters to Rediff about this elicited no response. This writer too wrote to rediff.com asking for clarifications about Mr. Srinivas' experience but has not heard from them yet. If hacking a person's password is so easy, what is the point in having a private e-mail id of this kind? The service providers should find some mechanism to verify the authenticity of a mail before divulging the password of a user. I present this issue here just to warn the readers that they have to be careful with their accounts and the best way to secure mails is to encrypt them. In fact, this aspect was mentioned in an article on `e-mail security' that appeared in this column a year ago:

(indiaserver.com/thehindu/2000/02/23/stories/0623000c.htm).

J. Murali

(The author can be contacted at: murali27@satyam.net.in)

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Science & Tech
Next     : DNA analysis turns up new species