gHacks technology news » check places http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Tue, 24 Nov 2009 22:37:16 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Verify Firefox Bookmarks With Check Places http://www.ghacks.net/2009/10/22/verify-firefox-bookmarks-with-check-places/ http://www.ghacks.net/2009/10/22/verify-firefox-bookmarks-with-check-places/#comments Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:05:49 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=17582 The amount of bookmarks increases with time. Most users add bookmarks regularly from time to time but do not delete them if they are not needed anymore or if the websites ceased to exist. One of the main reasons for this is that most web browsers do not provide the tools to check bookmarks effectively. It feels strange that no web browser offers a tool to verify that the bookmarks are still pointing to a valid website and not a 404 error page.

Check Places for Firefox adds the option to verify all bookmarks in the Firefox web browser. It can be used to check all bookmarks (with the option to exclude folders) or only specific folders that the Firefox user selects.

check places

A click on the check bookmarks button will start the verification. The time it takes to verify the bookmarks depends on the amount of bookmarks and the Internet connection.

It took about a minute to check 489 bookmarks on a fast Internet connection. The add-on will display statistics on the report page including the time it took to verify the bookmarks and the number of bookmarks that got verified.

Errors are divided into the three categories failed pages, duplicates and empty folders. Failed pages are those with dns, page or other errors. These pages can be temporarily or permanently unavailable.

verify bookmarks

Each bookmark is listed in its own row. Selecting a bookmark will display additional information about the bookmark with the options to open, delete or exclude the bookmark.

The whole process – even if the pages with errors are verified manually – takes less than five minutes to complete.

Check Places is an add-on for the Firefox 3 web browser. It can be downloaded from the Mozilla Firefox website.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2009/10/22/verify-firefox-bookmarks-with-check-places/feed/ 2 Check Firefox Bookmarks http://www.ghacks.net/2009/02/26/firefox-bookmarks/ http://www.ghacks.net/2009/02/26/firefox-bookmarks/#comments Thu, 26 Feb 2009 17:01:17 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=10786 Up until recently there was not a single add-on available for the Mozilla Firefox 3 web browser that would check the bookmarks for invalid or duplicate entries. Several add-ons existed that were able to perform the checks in Firefox 2. The reason for the missing add-ons was a change in the storage location for Firefox bookmarks that was introduced in Firefox 3 that rendered all existing add-ons incompatible.

Check Places is the first Firefox 3 extension that can check all Firefox 3 bookmarks for duplications and invalid references aka dead pages. The experimental add-on can be downloaded right from the Mozilla website after logging in as a user. The new Check Places entry will be added by the Firefox add-on to the bookmarks menu. A click on that link will open a new window that the user can use to configure the scan behavior.

It is possible to scan all bookmarks or only selected folders. Exclusions can be made so that some bookmarks or folders will not be scanned in the process. The scan itself can check if the pages that the bookmarks point to exist and if it is stored more than once in the bookmarks.

check firefox bookmarks

The scan does not take long, a few minutes for a few hundreds bookmarks. The results are displayed in a tabbed interface detailing the bookmarks that have returned a page not found error and those that have been recognized as duplicates.

firefox bookmarks

Each Firefox bookmark can be opened and checked individually. The extension will list the return status of the page, e.g. 404 page not found or 500 Internal server error to aid the user in his decision. A simple timeout for example usually means that the page could be back up later while a 404 usually hints at a more severe problem.

Selected bookmarks or all can be deleted in the end to clean the Firefox bookmarks from duplicates and invalid entries. Check Places is a great Firefox 3 extension, must have for every Firefox user that has more than a handful of bookmarks and indispensable for users with hundreds and more.

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