Share your bookmarks

You know how you collect all those web site addresses in your Favourites or Bookmarks folders in your internet browser? Great - if you're using your own computer, that is. But they're never there when you want to show someone something but can't quite recall that address.

I've been putting some course materials together for a new class and was just thinking what a drag it was having to list them again when, by chance, I came across a file called 'bookmarks'. Opened it and up sprang a complete list of all my bookmarks as a web page with active links you could click on and go. It wasn't up-to-date but was what I wanted.

Now I do have friend who is pretty psychic but even she couldn't have managed that. It's actually something that Firefox does that I hadn't realised. In the Bookmarks menu is Manage Bookmarks. Just use File | Export and it creates a list of them all. So a few seconds later I had a new up-to-date list ready to roll.

If you have a whole bundle of assorted links and don't want to share them all then you can delete some and it makes sense to sort them into order before the export bit. The file created can either be copied to a USB drive to use somewhere else or the smart option is to copy them onto your own web site if you have one. In colleges, you could either upload the page or copy and paste its contents into a new web page on a VLE. This works fine in Moodle, for example, and requires no special skills.

That saved me enough time to write this, too!