Bare Your Bar: The Bookmark Challenge

I think it was John Wayne who once remarked, ‘you never really know a man till you’ve seen his bar.’ Or maybe that was just me talking in a John Wayne voice. If so it was a pretty good John Wayne voice.

My point is, your bookmark bar boils crap down to the bare essentials. To the extent that you are what you surf, the bar is who you are. You can’t be all, ‘I can’t start my morning without reading The Atlantic and The Economist, they just put everything in perspective for me, you know?’ when in reality you’re just sucking down XKCD and checking your Twitter feed. The bar speaks only the truth.

So in the spirit of journalistic transparency, I’m going to transcribe my bookmarks bar. It goes, from left to right:

Gmail
Techland
The New York Times
io9
Ain’t It Cool News
Slashdot
Gawker
Kotaku
PvP
Penny Arcade
Achewood
Brownstoner (it’s a Brooklyn thing)
Time
Order of the Stick
Erfworld
XKCD
Facebook
Twitter
IMDb
Amazon
Time’s Intranet

There. I showed you mine. I challenge any and all Techlanders to show me theirs.

http://youtube.com/churchhatestucker Church

You don’t use folders in your bar? My ‘Faves’ one alone (where Nerd World still resides) is about three times longer than that.
michaeljspinelli

dude, sporcle.com NEEDS to be on your toolbar. c’mon.
http://webwanderings.wordpress.com/ AA

Not revealing the bar, but I wrote this post on managing it and making sure that it is also backed up without the use of any additional tools and/or efforts.

http://webwanderings.wordpress.com/2010/03/25/bookmarks-how-are-you-managing-them/
michaeljspinelli

btw, mine are:
barbri, banking, cnn, US constitution etc., college sporting news, espn, facebook, daily soccer fix, netflix, imdb, iwatchstuff, lexis-nexis, google maps, mls, a blog, rotten tomatoes, sporcle, techland, apple trailers, youtube, twitter, maryland law school, weather channel, wikipedia, furman football.

but i have clever abbreviations for all of them so they can fit. writing them out, i see that i can probably prune it back a little.
Caitlin Rosberg

I’m surprised by the lack of folders, myself, though not by the shameless plug from AA.
Mine, left to right:
Hulu
Evernote (the bookmarklet thing that makes a note)
Google Reader
Google Reader Subscribe
Share with note on Google Reader
Comics (Folder of the ~45 webcomics I read, divided in to sub-folders by day so I can open all in tabs, make a cup of coffee, and sit down to read them all)
Facebook
Ebay
Etsy
Netflix
Daily (Folder of the sites I visit sort of daily)
Site (Folder for all the stuff for my personal site)
Stuff (Folder for..stuff)
Shopping (Folder with links to things I want to buy)
Work (Folder for work links)
And I’ve also installed the Amazon universal wishlist thing & GetGlue on Chrome.
http://www.thecomplexmedia.com complexitii

At work I have over 170 Toolbar bookmarks in 10 Main folders:

- Mail
- Networks (all social networking sites besides Twitter)
- Twitter Tools (about 30 Twitter apps + Twitter)
- Portfolios (I’m a designer)
- Blogs
- News & Music (several subfolders, ie: “tech”)
- Web Tools
- Shopping
- Share (bookmarklets)

My home toolbars have much more.
Rorschach

I’m not going to show you mine because I actually love sports, and it’s crawling with it and you’ll pick on me!
http://webwanderings.wordpress.com/ AA

>>though not by the shameless plug from AA.<<

Hello blog editor, you may remove my above comment if your audience feels it is a shameless plug.
http://youtube.com/churchhatestucker Church

Here’s my complete bar (minus the temporary ones for current projects)

Gmail – Inbox
Slashdot (rarely visit these days)
Techdirt
Twitter
Apple (3 items)
Amazon (Why?)
Prepressure
Del (delicious links. Prolly can cull this)
Faves (Jeebus alone knows how much stuff is in there. I normally just look for the RSS update number to change)
Flickr Adv. (advanced search)

Yeah, I really need to update that.
omghoopla

ok so mine is pretty extensive (it goes on to the side where its no longer a bar but just a list)
From left to right (to list)
some of these will have the URL because the sites names aren’t very ummm common.
Techland
MLIA
http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1CQt0z/www.instantsfun.es/
(awesome random sound effects)
Thesaurus.com (BROUGHT BY DICTIONARY.COM)
Dictionary.com
Gmail
Google (hacker language)
Google Images (pirate language)
Youtube
My school’s history page (can’t put school url’s)
My school’s math page
My school’s english page
My school’s wellness page (My school runs on a laptop program it gets really handy when keeping up in class)
Sparknotes
Rock it Out! Blog (www.rockitoutblog.com)
Abduzeedo
Another techland article i love
Super mario crossover (on newgrounds)
Super long list of google Capchas (I dont even know why…)
EcoGeek
Nerdfighters
And after that like 4 more photoshop tutorials i need to get around to doing someday :)

yeah it would be a good idea to clean some stuff up… like the capchas I mean, seriously…
beckie66

I really don’t use tool bars anymore. Weird, I know, but I like the uncluttered look. My homepage for Chrome is just google.com – I log into iGoogle or gmail from there and I am good to go. For Firefox, which I use the most, it is CafeMom, where I usually visit at least once a day. I don’t use IE much at all anymore.
omghoopla

and now thanks to this post IMDb and penny arcade
tereglith

TROLOLOLOLOOOOO!!!