SillyDog701

[Shortsy]

Thanks Fulvio for responding. I think the prior message and your response shows it should have been amplified upon.

Of course, my(our) bookmarks reflect my(our) interests.
And no doubt, all of us are the same.

Well, my interests are, I build things (eg 'concept' fishing rods, computer PCs, I surf fish, etc) and my personal (bookmarks) are a reflection of that kind of activity as well as home and family life;

And further I am a Drudge and Newsmax news junkie; and beyond even that, I do a lot of surf fishing; on & on. So I have been 'putting' bookmarks related to these kinds of travails under 'new folder' headings, all of the time, within Netscape bookmarks file. BTW Very little use of MSIE v6.0. I cant even recall any problem, like this, with NC v4.79

Eventually, I've got to the point where I have had multiple folder headings 'sites' within this rather portly bookmarks file which, each, have the same or a similar headings. I want to 'thin' or consolidate these things.

To do 'that', I have to be able to easily find both headings and bookmarks.

With NS 7 & 7.02, I can search for a bookmark(s), but I am compelled to find headings 'visually'. No other choice is apparent. Why?

I'm looking for help, here. To just to learn one simple thing, 'How to search Bookmarks for folder headings?' such as within the Bookmark manager.
And by the way, generally (more often than not) my folder headings are hierarchical in character. And they contain the same and sometimes different bookmarks.

In a past 'thinning' attempt, I found Compass. Which I may revisit because it seems to have potential. But at that time, it was disastrous. Everything seemed to work well. But later, I began to discover numerous non-duplicates, just GONE. I'm not inclined to fault Compass however.

I hope this post is helpful along with my prior post.

Bob Marie

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20030208 Netscape/7.02 (ax; CDonDemand-Dom)

[Fulvio]

Bob Marie,
NS4.x and 7.x and the corresponding Mozilla are very different, and, often not comparable. I was not familiar with the feature which you described, and, while 4.x open the folder, and shows the location in the folder, the new ones will give you no idea of the location in the Bookmarks folder. It seems that the purpose of the Search was more in localizing the bookmark, in the old NS. Right now, it seems that the URL is most important.
I can understand your problem.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040616

[akbash]

I'm more familiar with the more recent Mozilla builds; my Netscape 4 and 7 memories are a little hazy. But as you mentioned Shortsy, the built-in bookmarks search facility only searches for bookmarks by name. It can't search on the underlying URL or folder names (is that what you're calling "headings"?)

Things that might help: recent Mozilla builds do leading character matches in the Manage Bookmarks window. Just open the window and start typing. I imagine Netscape does that as well. It will match any text, including folder names. It does get a little confused with a bunch of folders open, resulting in an overall out-of-order list.

If you've thought about updating, Firefox can also sort bookmarks by other properties; the URL, for example. You'd probably find it most useful if it could sort a list with folders flattened but I believe it won't do that.

You could attack your bookmarks file with a good text editor (while Netscape is closed). Bookmarks are stored in a single file, profile directory/bookmarks.html.

Alternatively, you can simply open the file in Netscape. Launch Netscape, open your profile directory in Windows Explorer, drag and drop bookmarks.html into a browser window. It will give you a pleasant little list of all your bookmarks, with the folders expanded. Edit Menu -> Find In Page will allow you to search for any text in the bookmark or folder names. You can edit your bookmarks in the Manage Bookmarks window using the bookmarks displayed in the browser window as a guide.

If you go the latter route, you may find this little code bit useful. If you place it in your personal toolbar it becomes a button you can click. Open bookmarks.html and click this button; it will append the URL of each bookmark to its name. Find In Page will then also be able to find text in the bookmarks' URLs. Not to worry, those changes won't be written back to bookmarks.html. The change is restricted to the copy in the browser window.

Code: Select all

<html><body>
<a href="javascript:(function(){var i,a,alist = document.links; for(i=0; i<alist.length; ++i) { a = alist[i]; a.parentNode.insertBefore(document.createTextNode(' : '+a.href), a.nextSibling) }} )();">show URLs</a>
</body></html>

Since SillyDog Forums doesn't allow HTML in comments, I can't make it easy for you. If you want to use this, copy the text of the above codeblock to a text file named something.html. You may have to adjust the number of lines. I just tried selecting the text, copying, pasting into Notepad and saving the file, and it worked correctly. I can't promise it will work as well for you. In any case you don't want any line breaks within the function definition (line 2 of 3). Gosh this would be easier if I could just post HTML.

Anyway having done that, open something.html in Netscape. It will display a page consisting of one link. Drag that link to your personal toolbar. Open bookmarks.html and click the personal toolbar button you just created to display each link's URL. When you're done with this personal toolbar button, you can remove it from your toolbar using the Manage Bookmarks facility.

Caveat lector: I tested this with Mozilla. I really expect all of this to work equally well in the older Netscape, but I haven't actually tried it there.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8a2) Gecko/20040616 Firefox/0.8.0+

[Fulvio]

It is my understanding, and, of course, he would tell us, that he does not want the information which is available all all along, but, rather, in which folder is a bookmark. For instance: I have, in NS4.8 as well as Netscapes, Mozillas and Firefoxes, the same folder named AV, for antiVirus, and there is a bookmark for Stinger, a free standing utility from McAfee.
If I do a search for stinger, with all folders closed, 4.8 will open the folder in question and highlight the bookmark, while all the others will give the name of the folder and URL. The 4.8 way is, by far, the better one to look for duplication, or anything else which you may have been looking for.
I think that he is looking for this. It would be nice to have a location in the bookmarks.html, as well as URL location.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8a2) Gecko/20040618 Firefox/0.8.0+

[Shortsy]

Thank you! to both of you two, Fulvio & Akbash.

I did interchange the term 'headings' in referring to 'folder name'.
And, Akbash I tried the first part of opening 'bookmarks.html' with NS7.02 launched. I must say, it looks suspiciously like something that I've bumped into before this.

I'm going to ponder that and 'see' if there is some way to make use of it for editting 'bookmarks.html'. Perhaps, theres a way to use windows 'sendto'. I'll have to research along that 'way'.

One important 'step', for me, is that you two indirectly have confirmed that in NS7.02 there is no simple way to search the 'bookmarks.html' both for bookmarks and for folder name text. Thats helpful! To know that that area isnt likely to bear fruit.

I can 'share' one new item ;
tonight, I tried a piece of shareware called 'Link Commander'.
I'm doing my editting on a working copy of the 'bookmarks.html'.

'Link Commander' has an 'explorer-like', 2-pane, editor interface complete with search, cut, copy , paste, etc. including drag & drop, and in essence, everything that one might look for on a 'notepad', 'textpad' or beyond.

Moreover, 'Link Commander' did 'function' on-line where I browsed to a URL which was located via a search using an example 'folder-name'.
I dont, as yet, know if I can 'drop' new bookmarks into the online file in the same manner that NS7.02 and friends might.

But 'Link Commander' appears to fulfill my wishes for searching, both, for bookmarks and for folder headings while doing the desired editting.

It seems that I'll have a revised 'bookmarks.html', sample file, with the majority of desired changes incorporated (measured) in hours rather than in days (my guess is 3 to 6 hours).

A question does remain, of course:
'Will Link Commander produce a viable and uncorrupted 'bookmarks.html' file?
After finishing expected editting, I will, then, backup and replace the original 'bookmarks.html' with this revised 'one'. Then I'll validate that it is, in fact, viable by 'giving it a test-ride'. Hopefully, that is sufficient validation or not.

If you wish, I'll share my conclusions from the test-ride scenario.

Thanks,

Bob Marie

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20030208 Netscape/7.02 (ax; CDonDemand-Dom)

[Shortsy]

just an afterthought; Fulvio and Akbash

As an addenda I tried 'sendto' with Netscape v7.02 integrated into the 'sendto' application list.

Its clear that if I have an effective 'html file editor' . it would be a fair expectation that that could work. Actually, I didnt have one; so I tried it with Netscape v7.02.

On 'sendto' :

If you're not familiar with it; try this for illustration purposes:
o find the 'NS v7.02 shortcut link and put a copy of it in C:\windows\sendto,
o open windows explorer' ,as usual,
o navigate to a copy 'bookmarks.html' or original.
o highlight it and rightclick on 'sendto', and
o away you go. SNS (er, smiley-no-smiley).

sincerely,
Bob Marie

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20030208 Netscape/7.02 (ax; CDonDemand-Dom)

[akbash]

Guess I should have thought of the "maybe some third-party bookmarks editing application, then" solution . I've never used Link Commander. Its website says it knows how to export bookmarks to Netscape, so while that's probably almost no effort for it, at least it sounds as if LC's authors have troubled themselves to make sure it's able to write a valid copy of bookmarks.html. Anyway, cool; $35 seems a worthy trade-off for a couple of days(!) of grunt work.

PS I'm curious. How many bookmarks is that? Is it a five digit number? And you know to keep copies of the file, but still I felt I should reinforce that practice.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8a2) Gecko/20040619 Firefox/0.8.0+

[nicks888]

I too would like to see this function that was in NS4.x returned to NS7.x

Thanks akbash but I tried to both left and right drag the created link to my personal toolbar - did not work.

A major reason I use NS is because of its superior bookmark management.
I hope this feature comes back.

Nick

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040804 Netscape/7.2 (ax)