All of a sudden, I found myself rearranging and sorting my bookmarks. For many years now, I have ported them from browser generation to browser generation. They made the transition from Netscape to IE, from IE to Opera, from Opera back to IE and finally from IE to Firefox. I more or less tried to keep them sorted in folders, but only recently, when I experimented with a synchronisation tool, they became all messed up. So here I am, sorting them back into folders…
Having a look on all these bookmarks, I feel like an archeologist venturing forward layer for layer, digging away the dust of millenia. In Internet-timeframes, it’s quite an accurate comparison since some of these bookmarks are about 10 years old! It also reflected may varying interests over the years. There were a few categories I cleaned out completely svae for one or two authorative sites.
The majority of deletions however were sites that no longer exist. Mostly, I get a 404. But in a few cases, I get redirects to new sites. And that is actually the pretty amazing part: to see where some of these sites have ended up. There was a network security tool called “Abacus Sentry” by a small company named “Psionic”. If you go to www.psionic.com today, you end up at – Cisco Systems! Seems the guy did a got job and was bought. Another site redirected to Novell, Allaire – the creators of Homesite – got bought by Macromedia.
OK, short break is over, the web-archeologist goes back to work…
Update: Look what I just found: http://www.altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=aq – that’s the old web address for AltaVista, my favourite search engine when I got tired of Yahoo…