(bookmarks = Favorites, for those of you, using Internet Explorer)

I’ve transfered my book marks with me from computer to computer for a long time. I’m unsure how far back, but there where bookmarks for site like DejaNews in there, and they got eaten by google (groups) around 2001.
Before I began the clean up it had about 650 book marks and the bookmarks.html file was about 150Kb.

Luckily I changed the way I use bookmarks a couple of years a go – when Firefox got the bookmarks toolbar – making it fairly easy to search out the old bookmarks, that hadn’t been used since I switched (I started putting all bookmarks in the “bar”, and never used the bookmarks menu item).

I looked through the old bookmarks and nearly non of them worked! Most of them gave 404’s (server working but page not found) but quite a few of them gave a Server Not Found error. I didn’t count but I think that about one in 10 worked, but half of these didn’t give the expected results. I fund ONE bookmark that I found useful (PhotoZone.de), which I hadn’t already added to the bar. So delete, delete.

The web is a lot more dynamic that I thought! Not that I though that all site would live forever, but I didn’t think that it would be as “bad” as that. Is it bad? I don’t really know – manually keeping a bookmark file up to date, would be a chore, but I really don’t use my bookmarks that much any more. I often find myself typing the url of my most used sites, even though I know exactly where in my bookmarks to find them, or I’ll even search for just as much as needed on google.

Now, I’ve 220 bookmarks in a 70Kb file (the reason the file isn’t that much smaller is that Firefox now stores the site logo in the bookmarks file, so any site that I’ve browsed since they started doing that will fill a lot more in the file)