Furl Those URLs

Just took a quick at Furl, a new web site for organizing bookmarks centrally (tip of the blog hat to Seb). The concept is not new at all, but I have found most of these sorts (e.g. BackFlip) too tedious to maintain. It’s gotta be simple.

Bookmarks/favorites in web browsers have hardly evolved since Mosaic. Even when organized into folders, once past a few hundred, they are unwieldy. And I cannot tell you how many times I was looking for a web site only to realize I had marked it on the home computer. I have resorted to emailing myself URLs on my IMAP account.

But Furl stores them centrally, with flexible topic names, and…. (drum roll please) RSS feeds for my own “Furls”, even feeds for topics within. Now that is different.

Adding a new site to one’s Furl’ed collection is matter of a click of a link on a toolbar “bookmarklet” If you can select text on the web page, it gets inserted into the Furl comments box. Note that to get the bookmarklet tool to work for Safari (like all others, e.g. Google , MT), you need to edit it to use t=getSelection(); rather than t=document.selection; or:

javascript:d=document;t=getSelection();void(furlit=window.open('http://www.furl.net/storeIt.jsp?
t='+escape(d.title)+'&u='+escape(d.location.href)+'&c='+escape(t),'furlit','scrollbars=no,width=475,
height=575,left=75,top=20,status=no,resizable=yes'));furlit.focus();

I hope to “unfurl” a big list of Furls over the next few days

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The Furl Those URLs by CogDogBlog, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

3 Responses to “Furl Those URLs”

  1. Regarding your post, you may find the following two blog posts interesting:

    http://duskanddawn.blogspot.com/2004_01_25_duskanddawn_archive.html#107531194707161785

    http://duskanddawn.blogspot.com/2004_02_01_duskanddawn_archive.html#107583068068136163

    Sounds like what you’ve written isn’t so far from this. One thing I’d still like to see added: the visual component.

  2. Jason says:

    I’ve been using Del.icio.us, which does much the same thing. Something else that I like is the fact that I can feed my latest links to my front page with mt-rssfeed. I was also able to share a particular topic with other people who are taking the same course as I am.

    I also enjoy looking at the links added by others who have bookmarked the same sites as I have. I have found some really interesting stuff that way.

  3. Use t.getSelection() INSTEAD OF t=document.selection to make FURL bookmarklets work with Safari

    The secret tip is: use t=getSelection()

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