Practical Blogging Tips: Create a “To Read” Folder

By Raj DashBlogging

Over the past four calendar years of blogging, I’ve jumped from one method to another while doing daily research. This hopping between methods is not premeditated, just incidental. For a while I’ll use RSS readers, then I’ll switch to Popurls clones, for monitoring the top blogs in a niche.

Still, there is one thing I do that stays pretty much consistent: using browser bookmarks. I keep the following folders:

  1. Daily Sites – For sites that I want visit daily but don’t necessarily want to have in my “niche dashboard.”
  2. Weekly Sites – For sites that I want to visit several times per week but don’t need to visit daily.
  3. Infrequent – For sites that I want to visit no more than once every week or two weeks.
  4. To Read – for actual web pages that I want to fully read later, for improve my knowledge on a subject. Sometimes, these pages are not read for months, sometimes just weeks.

The key to successfully using these folders is to make a habit of it. Sure, you could use Del.icio.us for bookmarking. I have, but I find that I never actually go back and read any of those bookmarks. I find that keeping my Firefox browser bookmarks pane open at all times to be much more “in my face.” So I’m far more likely to actually go back and read bookmarked URLs. It works for me; it might work for you.

6 thoughts on “Practical Blogging Tips: Create a “To Read” Folder”

  1. > Del.icio.us by itself doesn’t work for me.

    I never touch d.i.u directly because it is too slow loading my huge profile page (because of 1,000s of tags). I even prefer to just open the RSS feeds with the keyword if I need something quick.

    The initial opening of the bookmarks sidebar is slow too but once loaded it performs very well.

  2. Markus: Yeah, good point. That might be a nice tool. Del.icio.us by itself doesn’t work for me.

  3. The Firefox del.icio.us add-on is a great bookmark reading help because you only have to assign a special bookmark for your dailies.

    I.e. I have the tags blog:write, blog:photography and blog:date. Having these tags is great for the sidebar and it is also good for the del.icio.us favorites.

    As you can open all links in tabs from the favorites this is handy when doing a research or following a topic. Just bookmark with i.e. blog:search:subject.

    The same for statistics/analytics, etc.

  4. Spudart: I tried the days of the week folders but found I never kept up. Are you able to?

  5. I also still use bookmarks in folders on firefox to check websites that don’t have feeds. There’s a daily folder, like yours. Then for the weekly folders, I break them up into five folders. One for each day of the week. So on a Wednesday, I check all the bookmarks in the wednesday folder. And then the monthly websites get checked on the first of the month (the folder is appropriately called “1”)

  6. I do the same thing, but I have discovered that it is easier for me to manage everything when it’s Google based. I migrated all my feeds from Live Booknarks to Google Reader, which shows only the posts that I have yet to read. Resources and posts to save for later are stored in Google Bookmarks. If I left these things only in StumbleUpon, I would have to search through a bunch of things I liked to find those that were truly useful.

    All of these services can actually be opened in your FireFox sidebar… shankrila.com has many tutorials on the subject, but it’s pretty straightforward.

Comments are closed.