Do Your Browser Bookmarks Need A Mac Librarian?

A few times a year I have to do spring cleaning on my Mac. Yes, spring only comes once a year, but if I don’t do it twice a year then it takes six months to clean my mess. Mess? Bookmarks in Safari.

I collect bookmarks. Every day I add a few more. Multiply that times 365 days a year and you can see the problem. Many of those sites I never visit again. But I still spend time organizing my book mark collection.

A few weeks ago I signed up for one of those Mac software bundles. You know the kind. You spend $49 and get a dozen Mac software titles, usually decent ones, in a package. Half I use. Half I don’t. Half I have already. Strangely, the math works.

One that caught my eye right away is a bookmark organizer called Webbla. It’s billed as the Bookmark Library Assistant for OS X Leopard. This is both good news and bad news.

The good news is that I have yet another way to manage my bookmarks, and I have too many (maybe a free self help, 12 step program of some kind would work better). The bad news is that Webbla works, which means I keep adding bookmarks.

Another issue is keeping bookmarks synchronized between my various browsers (Safari, Fireworks, Camino, OmniWeb, Opera, MSIE, Chrome), Mac and PC. More on that later.

Webbla is an intuitive (which means I could figure it out without getting mad at my husband) bookmark organizer that goes beyond just storing a list of web site URLs.

Not only does Webbla categorize and organize bookmarks however you’d like. It also displays thumbnail snapshots of the web pages which provides a quick visual reference.

Here’s another goodie. You can import and export your browser bookmarks to other browsers on your Mac. Think of it as selective synchronization.

Webbla also works with OS X’s Spotlight for search, Cover Flow for eye candy search, and Quick Look for when you need to look at the site without opening the site in your browser.

If you love Haagen-Dasz ice cream then you love the eye candy in Cover Flow, that chic and sassy, finger flippin’ way to browse through stuff on a Mac. Webbla lets you use Cover Flow in the Finder to finger flip through your bookmarks without your finger.

Fun, huh? I have about 1,000 bookmarks, so I’m not doing any finger flippin’ or mouse pointer flippin’, but your mileage may vary.

Managing bookmarks in Webbla is easy enough. Drag and drop, import and export, create shortcuts, even build your own little browser “tag cloud.”

Tag is another way to say keywords, but I have enough trouble with collections and smart collections to not venture too swiftly into the newness of cloudy anything.

With so many bookmarks how do I know when a site has been updated? Without RSS I can’t. It’s too time consuming. So, I let Webbla do the work for me, checking those sites that are most important (many corporate and reference sites are not into RSS) to me.

I’ve used Bookdog and Bookit for years, and loved the way they kept my bookmarks in sync, kept me organized. Compared to Webbla, both are so Space: 1999.

What I want is a sweet combination of ease of use, and depth of character; defined as enough features to make me feel good, not so much that I feel confused. Webbla scores well on both points.

How do you handle your Mac’s bookmarks? All in Safari? All over the place? Share your experience with other Mac360 readers in the Comments section below.