Favorites Plus is a program that can convert your Internet Explorer favorites into an html web page categorized according to your IE favorites folder structure.
It can do this for all your bookmarks or a subset that you select. It can also set the resulting html page as your IE home page.
Useful things, bookmarks, aren’t they? Well apparently not. According to two University of Washington researchers, bookmarks have become “information closets that contain a jumble of sites people never return to”.
Only a very small number of users (estimated at fewer than 1%) actually return to websites they bookmarked, and only the “hyperorganized” ever go back and sort sites into folders and clean out dead links. (Lisa Guernsey, “Now Where Was I? New Ways to Revisit Web Sites,” New York Times, Jan 22, 2004).
For myself I know that I use approx 5% of all the bookmarks in my favorites folder on a daily basis, and the others almost none at all. I also know that I don’t really want to get rid of all of the others, at least not until I get a chance to organize them. But even after they are (hypothetically) organized, I still know that I will not use 95% of them whether now or in the future.
Enter Favorites Plus. It will NOT help you organize anything, but it will enable you to quickly create a web page that you can use as your default homepage that can contain only the links that you use a lot; in a sense, a bookmark-launcher home page. Here’s what I like about this program:
- It allows you to check or uncheck all the bookmarks/folders you want or don’t want included.
- Offers simple, intuitive controls: check/uncheck all or category, expand/collapse all, and an html color scheme editor.
- It offers a handful of different web-page color scheme templates to choose from. None will win a design award, but simple and usable.
- The generated web page will contain “category” links on top that will quickly send you down to the category you want down the page. These categories mirror your folder structure, including subfolders.
- You can edit the resulting web page with MS Word or a WYSIWYG HTML editor like NVU (free), or even with notepad or a text editor if you don’t mind looking at a bit of HTML.
What I don’t like about this program:
- No Firefox support.
- It will add a “this page created by favorites plus” header and footer to your page. I suppose you can’t really fault the author for this, but anyway can be easily removed with an editor as mentioned above.
All in all a simple and straightforward program that does what it promises. For myself I’ve accepted that my bookmarks will always be information closets that I will rarely use. With Favorites Plus at least I can periodically go in and select a handful of links that I use frequently and convert these into start-page links.
Version tested: 5.1
Compatibility: WinAll.
The program page no longer exists, but you can download ver. 5.1 here.
