Soulstretch9 wrote on Jan 25
th, 2014 at 4:25am:
I don't know how to separate this as a quote
Yes, all bulletin board software is wacky in one way or another. Quoting is a pain. The reasons we stick with this board (YaBB) are (a) it would take a long time to make our own and (b) YaBB has excellent spam resistance.
Soulstretch9 wrote on Jan 25
th, 2014 at 4:25am:
Mavericks does not have editable URL names, nor the ability to highlight, copy and paste a URL, as one can do in Lion/Mtn Lion
If you click on the URL in the maverick-style bookmark it just goes straight to the web page and doesn't let you change anything in the bookmark itself.
Ah, now I understand. When you say
Mavericks you mean
the version of Safari (7.x) that ships with Mavericks. You're a Safari user. All of your bookmarks are in Safari.
Anyhow, you
certainly can edit your bookmarks in Safari 7.0, just as in earlier versions. In Safari's
Bookmarks menu the first item is
Show (or
Hide)
Bookmarks, and the second item is
Edit Bookmarks. It appears to me that maybe you have discovered the first item but not the second. Try it. You can edit bookmarks names, URLs, delete or move bookmarks, and in the bottom left corner there is a
New Folder button. Indeed, like everything in Mavericks, you have to dig a little deeper to get at the geek tools. But most of them are still there.
Soulstretch9 wrote on Jan 25
th, 2014 at 4:25am:
I refer to my massive Safari Bookmarks file with its dozens of subfolders sorted by topic (each with dozens to a couple of hundred listed items) as a database.
Ah, well then all you need to do in BookMacster is to import from Safari. It will not delete any duplicates.
Soulstretch9 wrote on Jan 25
th, 2014 at 4:25am:
It's important that the URL database or Bookmark database allows me to edit the URL topic field because the title of the webpage is often vague or not useful at all. In Safari what I call the URL topic field is the column on the left; the one on the right has the active URLs in it.
I think what you mean by
topic field is simply the bookmark's
name. In Safari, each bookmark has two fields:
name (which appears on the left in the
Edit Bookmarks outline) and
Address (URL) (which appears on the right in the
Edit Bookmarks outline).
Soulstretch9 wrote on Jan 25
th, 2014 at 4:25am:
I like to add notes to the topic field about any changes
Again, you can do that, in
Edit Bookmarks. Real bookmarks managers, of which BookMacster is only one, provide more fields: comments, tags, shortcut, that you might find useful. But if you've got all of this information crammed into bookmark names, importing into BookMacster will not separate it out. Whatever is in the bookmark
name in Safari will be in the bookmark
name when you import it into BookMacster.
Soulstretch9 wrote on Jan 25
th, 2014 at 4:25am:
(I think Apple is trying to make everything work like iOS.)
Well, you could start me on that, but every time I start a rant about Apple I remember to stop and ask myself:
Which one of us has 150 billion in the bank? Soulstretch9 wrote on Jan 25
th, 2014 at 4:25am:
I am considering also using Firefox for some functions,
Indeed, Firefox has those extra fields that I just listed BookMacster has.
Soulstretch9 wrote on Jan 25
th, 2014 at 4:25am:
but am not starting that yet until I find out how and whether i can establish a central Bookmark system to which I can back up new ones, without over-writing existing entries there.
Yes, that is the purpose of BookMacster. You can essentially have three stores: The bookmarks in Safari, the bookmarks in Firefox, and the bookmarks in BookMacster. If you configure syncing, BookMacster will keep them all the same. But in your case, you want to keep them separate and only
import and
export manually. Syncing in BookMacster is off by default; just don't switch it on. Use
File >
Import and
File >
Export when you want to overwrite from or to Safari or Firefox. With syncing off,
Import and
Export are completely under your control. Everything in BookMacster stays only in BookMacster, everything in Safari stays only in Safari, and everything in Firefox stays only in Firefox, if and until you
Import or
Export. I hope that's clear. Also, you can
add bookmarks to BookMacster directly and visit bookmarks from BookMacster while in your browser. That's what I do.
Soulstretch9 wrote on Jan 25
th, 2014 at 4:25am:
I wish that Safari provided an automatic dating for the bookmarks, both the original visit and subsequent ones. All the businesses track the sites we 'consumers' visit in order to target advertising, so we should have that info too! I'd like to have a way to track my visits by date maybe a separate column. I don't delete a bookmark just because the site is taken down, blocked or moved. I like having the history of different places I went to get data about certain topics and commentary.
That's interesting that you want to track yourself. Firefox and BookMacster keep a date added and
last visited date, but not every visit. Firefox does not show you these numbers, but BookMacster does.
OmniWeb (the original web browser on the Mac, which we thought was dead but was recently updated to version 6) shows
Total visits, but they're the only one that does so.
Soulstretch9 wrote on Jan 25
th, 2014 at 4:25am:
In Safari, I have been adding notes to the URL topic field about these changes because there's no other column provided where I can put that.
You must have some really long messy bookmark names there. I'd say you've definitely outgrown Safari!
You've got an interesting use case. Let us know if you have any more questions.