Tutorial

Intro

What is Bookmark-Manager?

The Bookmark-Manager is an open-source tool to manage your bookmark collection. If you have a large collection or you want to do fancy stuff with your bookmarks, this tool might prove useful. But if you don't manage a lot of bookmarks, just your daily newspaper and the homepages of some friends, you won't need Bookmark-Manager. It will just waste disk space.

About this tutorial

This tutorial was written in the hope that it helps beginners to start using Bookmark-Manager. It's not intended as a reference for advanced users. If you have any feedback be it errors, suggestions or thanks so please mail me at <patricech@sourceforge.net>.

Start up

When you start Bookmark-Manager for the first time, you'll get a question dialog asking you if you want to enable "Auto Update". This is a function which automatically checks for new updates of Bookmark-Manager at startup. So it only works if you're online at the time of starting BKM. I suggest you to enable this feature, it'll cost you nothing.

When you click this dialog away, you'll get a rather empty window. Bookmark-Manager is based on databases for your bookmarks. For large collection this is quite reasonable for example if you want to create company-wide collections. To create your first bookmark database click File->New or press the shortcut Ctrl+D. Enter a name for your database, for example "my bookmarks.bkm" and click Save to create the database.

Now the treeview in the Bookmark-Manager window fills with to folders. The root folder of your collection, named "Bookmarks" and the trash.

Create bookmarks and folders

Assuming you've created a database by now, we're now going to populate the empty database. One of the key concepts of BKM is the popup menu. Most important functions are placed there. Right-click on the root folder named "Bookmarks" and you'll get the popup menu.

Create a bookmark

Select New bookmark or use the shortcut Ctrl+N to create your very first bookmark. Enter a descriptive title, for example "Bookmark-Manager project site". Then click into the URL text field and enter the URL "http://sourceforge.net/projects/bkm/". Now press the Enter key or click the button Save to save your changes. The bookmark is now saved to the database. If you want to open this bookmark in the browser, double-click it in the treeview. This will open your default browser. You can change this behavior in the settings.

Create and use a folder

Storing all the bookmarks in the same folder isn't really useful so Bookmark-Manager allows you to categorize your bookmarks using folders. To create a folder open the popup menu and click New folder. You can also press the shortcut Ctrl+A. You get a new folder with the name "New folder". To rename it, enter the new title and press Enter. For this example's sake, enter "Bookmark-Manager" as the title and press the Enter key.

An empty folder isn't very useful so we're going to move the example bookmark into this folder. This is possible with Drag&Drop. Just move the bookmark over the new folder.

Also any newly created bookmark or folder using the methods described above will be create in the active folder. So if you select the new folder and press the shortcut Ctrl+N the bookmark is created in this folder.

There are two primary ways to navigate around in your bookmark collection. One is to navigate manually and the other is finding your bookmarks using the search function.

If you navigate manually you just open every folder where you think your bookmark might lie. This procedure is quite effective if your bookmarks are organized well. But if your bookmarks are one big mess the search function is more useful.

The search function was one of the main reasons why I started developing Bookmark-Manager. You can fire the search window with the shortcut Ctrl+F or by clicking the menu item Extras->Search.

Now enter your search term and press Enter. This will start the search using the default options. The default options just include all bookmarks or folders which match the search term in any field.

If you're working with a really large bookmark collection, you may want to use the advanced function. Click on the field "Search options" to open the search settings. You can narrow the results using different qualifiers. For example you can tell the search function to only find bookmarks (Type = Bookmark) and to search the URL for the search term but no other fields.

Import existing bookmarks

If you're trying Bookmark-Managers you most probably already have a rather large bookmark collection. Bookmark-Manager has some import modules so that you can transfer your existing bookmarks to BKM. The procedure is almost the same for any of the three browsers so I'll show you the principles with Opera.

Fire up the Opera import window with the menu item File->Import>Opera. Type the name to the Opera hotlist file into the text box. If you don't know the exact location of this file you can use the browse function. Press the button with the three dots and you'll get the browse dialog. Go to the folder where your Opera installation lies, select the hotlist file ("Opera5.adr" for recent installations) and press the Open button.

The next step is to select the folder where you want to import the new bookmarks into. You can create new folders directly from the import window. I suggest you to create a folder with a name indicating that it contains temporary items. For example "_tmp".

After selecting the right folder press the button Import. If you have a really large bookmark collection this may take some time. As soon as the import has finished you'll get a message saying that everything is fine and you can continue working. The bookmarks are now imported and you can sort them using the move functionalities.