Portable Web Pages -- An alternative to Bookmarks/Favorites

[old Harry Waldron]

For Windows users who want to try something completely new here ...

I retired from using Bookmarks and Favorites a couple of years ago. Instead I have web pages that have links as noted in the example below. On my local hard drive, I have this page (minus any images as a "text only" document with URLs).

EXAMPLE OF COMPLETE PAGE
http://www.geoapps.com/harry_waldron_vi ... inks.shtml


HOW TO CREATE & MAINTAIN A PORTABLE WEB PAGE

For non-web developers, if you have Office 2000 or Office XP you can create a Word document and save it as a "Web page" (HTML document) with text only links. I use the term Portable Web pages, as they are completely standalone (e.g., you can email, back them up on network / CD-R, etc).

Actually, I use true web authoring tools, but Word will also work (with a little Office XP blot / overhead but it ain't bad for text only pages with links ... ). You can open a new web document and cut/page URLs as noted in example below:

INTERNET SECURITY SITES
http://www.cert.org/ http://www.ciac.org/ciac/
http://www.gocsi.com/ http://www.securityfocus.com/
http://csrc.nist.gov/ http://www.trusecure.com/

Then set your home page to the address of this Word (you can do this thru the properties page of the file to cut/paste the true address). It might look something like this:

file:///C:\WebPages\Bookmarks.htm

You can edit and add/delete as desired. The neat part of this is you can create lots of additional pages and link them together in a "WebPages" folder on your C: drive.

Also, since I run multiple browsers, I set the HOME PAGE for each to this and delete all existing bookmarks (as IE, Opera, Phoenix, Mozilla, NS, etc. all give you a lot of canned default ones). You can also still do Favorites or Bookmarks as desired.

This approach isn't for everyone but it saves lots of work, esp. if you use more than one browser on your PC. Web developers might like this especially if they use more than one browser (e.g., I do a lot of Intranet development, so this helps me a lot).

[nicubunu]

HOW TO CREATE & MAINTAIN A PORTABLE WEB PAGE

For non-web developers, if you have Office 2000 or Office XP...

but if you are already using Mozilla, why not use Composer for that ?

[old Harry Waldron]

Thanks -- I might take a look at that at home ... Our corporate standard for web pages is Dreamweaver MX ... 8)

[seb]

My standard for web pages is XHTML: http://w3.org/TR/HTML/

[Tomer]

Netscape has (still exists in Mozilla) a better solution - bookmarks.html, which includes your bookmarks in HTML, including headers (folders) and descriptions.

[old Harry Waldron]

Netscape has (still exists in Mozilla) a better solution - bookmarks.html, which includes your bookmarks in HTML, including headers (folders) and descriptions.

Thanks for the feedback and that's a good point ... You could make Bookmark.html the master list (and even point other browsers like Opera or IE to it).

I mainly wanted to share the concept of using independant web pages instead of browser maintained lists of bookmarks or favorites. For example, on my XP system now, I have NS 7.01, IE 6 SP1, Mozilla 1.3, Phoenix .5, and Opera 7.03 all pointing to a standard web page on my hard drive as my "default home page" for all links.

This solution may not be the best for everyone, but in using it a few years universally among browsers (and even between Windows and Linux), it's worked well for me. 8)