My Documentation Directory
Along the lines of eBooks, I wanted to talk about my Documentation directory. Maybe it's obvious, but I've been using it for a month or so now and have decided it works, so I wanted to share.
I got sick of bookmarks. I would add and add and add and then never ever be able to find anything again. It's just too easy to click and save. But I needed to save stuff that I wanted to go back to, so I changed my system. I'm *always* online, so therefore the stuff online and the stuff off are essentially the same to me. Especially with WiFi, where I can get tired of sitting in my chair at the desk and go over to the easy chair but still be connected.
So therefore I wacked by my bookmarks completely (I never used them anyways) and started fresh. First I created a couple Bookmark Tabs which hold all the news I might want to read online, but aren't aggregated. I have a huge "mobile news" tabbed bookmarks folder that is good for that. The obligatory Google link. Docs for stuff I used often like J2SE and J2ME go on the toolbar. And I have some bookmarks for my weblogs so I don't have to fumble for menu items to get to the referrers or sign in. But that's about it. The rest go in my Documentations folder. I don't have "favorites" any more. If something is neat, I blog about it, or just remember something about it and 95% of the time Google can find it again.
Now the Documentations folder sits righ before the annoyingly titled Documents and Settings folder on my C: drive and has all the stuff that I may need to refer to in the future. It's got everything from eBooks (for the Palm, pirated texts off of Kazaa, and PDFs) as well as downloaded manuals in all forms like for MySQL, Nokia stuff and offline HTML books like Thinking in Java, etc. And now, by natural extension, it also has links as well. The links aren't separated out as such, everything is organized together more or less by their category and I just plop the stuff in their proper folder regardless of whether it's a file or a link. It's fantastic how it works. Sometimes I'll go to a manual that I need, and run across a useful article link that I saved from some online magazine. Or I can get back up to speed on a piece of technology that I haven't touched in a while because all the documentation and article links are in the same spot, easy to find.
It works quite well, if your bookmarks folder (or favorites) isn't working out for you, give it a try.
-Russ