Dead Link Detector
The longer you are online, the more bookmarks you can accumulate. Using sites like del.icio.us makes it even worse. Although I don’t have enough ambition to really clean up my bookmarks (it’s hard for me to throw some away), I have recently searched for software to help me out. For browser-based bookmarks (IE, Firefox, Opera), AM-Deadlink works really well. It asked me where my bookmarks were loaded for Firefox and it quickly weeded out my dead links and duplicate links. For del.icio.us, I needed something else. A quick search led me to Fresh Del.icio.us. All it required was a current JVM. I downloaded the zip file and extracted the lib directory and jar file. Upon starting, the program asked for my name and password for del.icio.us, then quickly weeded out dead and duplicate entries online. That takes care of what software can do right now. The reason I use del.icio.us in the first place is the tagging support. Although it’s still easier to wrap my brain around the folder concept of organization, tags make a lot of sense for something like a bookmark categorization. Obviously a site like IBM could fit into a bunch of categories such as hardware, software, services, etc. My company does a lot of business with IBM so I have a lot of links into their site. Software links could be tagged as ‘OS’ as well as ‘Security’. It quickly becomes hard to make a folder hierarchy that fits the possible multiple category choices, thus tags win the day.