Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Tidy up your bookmarks toolbar with these tools

I don't know about you, but when I find a site I want to visit again in Firefox, instead of adding it to my bookmarks (or tagging it on del.icio.us), I simply drag it onto my 'bookmarks toolbar'. I like my links to be on hand. I want to hit a button and go. i don't want to hit a button, wait for the bookmarks toolbar to appear, and then have to hunt through my bookmarks looking for the site I want to visit. It'd be quicker to Google it!

This is all well and good but what happens when your bookmarks toolbar fills up? Well you get those stupid little arrows at the end, which defies the point as you may as well use the bookmarks in the first place!

I Recently ran out of room at work, and then stumbled on a little trick which I'm going to share.  Several of my links on my toolbar had long names, for example, the 'French Sports Club - Forum'.  I could abbreviate that down to 'FSC' by right-clicking > Properties and renaming the link.  OR, because it uses a favicon which is recognisable to me, I could remove the text altogether and just leave the favicon on my toolbar! 

Fantastic!

But, I soon realised that not all the links had favicons which transferred to the toolbar.  For example. Facebook has a favicon.  visit facebook.com and notice the white 'f' on a blue background next to the address in the address bar.  That's great, but once you drag it onto your toolbar, the 'f' disappears! All that's left is a standard white rectangle which resembles a page.  So what do we do with these links?

We download & Install 'Favicon Picker 2' Which allows you to specify favicons for each link from icons or images on your hard drive! 

But how do you get the favicons on your hard drive.  Well visit this page, enter the URL in the box, and it will soon display the favicon for the site.  Right click & save the image.

Once you've done that, find the link you want to add the favicon to, right-click > properties. You'll now see a new area for the favicon. Browse to the .ico file you saved earlier and click ok!  Now you've added the favicon, get rid of the text and free up a bundle of room on your toolbar!

Huzzah!

I hope that helps you!  If it does, let us know :)

1 comment:

JamesD said...

that actually helped! I did think about shortening the buttons to just abbreviations but the favicon linky has officially been bookmarked by me :P

cheers bud!