I’m sure nearly everybody knows about this, but today’s tip is just a nudge to actually do it: if you have sites that you regularly visit – Facebook, email, the news, an online calendar, Amazon, favourite shops, etc. don’t waste time looking them up in your ‘favourites’. Next time you’re at one of those sites, just drag the address into the links bar of your browser. Get rid of all the crap ones that were pre-loaded there first, so you’ve got room.
There’s a quick video below of how to do this in Chrome, but the procedure’s the same in every browser I’ve come across:
- Delete unwanted links from the links bar (or bookmarks bar as it’s called in Chrome) by CTRL-click (Mac) or right click (PC) and selecting ‘delete’ for each unwanted link. This makes space for your own links.
- Go to one of your favourite/most used pages such as your web email account or Facebook, for example
- With the mouse, grab hold of the ‘favicon’ (the small image immediately left of the address) and drag it down to an empty space on the links bar. The cursor will turn to a + sign when you’re correctly positioned. Note: if you can’t see the links bar, it’s probably because you’ve opted to remove it from view – so go to the ‘View’ menu and make sure that the links/bookmarks bar is ticked.
- Let go of the mouse button (i.e. drop)
- Right-click/CTRL-click and edit the name of the link you just dropped to something short and memorable (so you can get more links in the bar). I use initials – i.e. Metafilter becomes MF
- Next time you want to go to one of your favourite sites, just click on the icon in the links bar
NOTES
- You can re-order the links on the bar by dragging them from left to right
- If you have links to several pages on the same site, you can create a folder on the toolbar and drop all the links to those pages into that folder.
- If your links bar starts running off the right hand side of the screen, delete some links. There’s no point in a links bar where you can’t see the links.
