Among the internet technologies that do not seem to set there is certainly the banle and always fundamental collection of favorite sites . Called favorites, bookmarks or bookmarks (in English), websites or individual internet pages whose address or URL is saved on the browser to find them easily and access them immediately by clicking on them.
On the internet there are a lot of services to save favorite sites online, reading news sites or blogs through feeds, saving favorites in Google Bookmarks, sharing links on American services such as Delicious, Reddit or Stumbleupon and many others but, at least for us Italians, the normal management of favorites via the browser remains used by most people.
On browsers, whatever you use: Internet Explorer, Edge, Google Chrome, Firefox and Safari, the favorites are marked with the symbol of a yellow star, like the one you can see here on the right.
In the long run, after surfing the internet for several years, we tend to save more and more websites on the favorites list .
Then there are 3 problems:
1) You may prefer to switch browsers from Explorer to Opera (for example) and want to import your favorites from one to the other.
2) You can change computers and you don't want to lose all references to web pages saved in the past.
3) You could decide to want to organize the long list of websites, which has become so long since you can no longer understand if certain sites still exist or not and if they had already been saved in the bookmarks before.
To solve the second problem on this list, you can use programs to backup your favorites, whatever browser you use.
A backup that can be restored also resolves the first problem.
The third problem, on the other hand, is the subject of this discussion, which proposes an easy method to check that there are no duplicates between the saved favorites and to verify that the saved web pages still exist, have not changed the address and have not disappeared .
To clean up the list of bookmarks and eliminate dead sites, you need a small software called AM-DeadLink .
This program works to check and verify the favorites collected with four browsers: Internet Explorer, Opera, Firefox and Chrome .
AM-DeadLink detects broken links and duplicates, and marks them for removal.
In addition, AM-DeadLink downloads the current favicon for all the favorites and bookmarks for the four browsers in order to give them a reference icon image.
AM-DeadLink is a free 1.3 MB download, it is also in Italian and its operation is quite simple.
Upon installation, AM-DeadLink provides an option to install itself as a normal Windows program or as a portable program.
The second option is for those who want to carry the software on a USB stick in order to clean up the favorites of multiple computers.
The interface is simple, with a drop-down menu to select the browser to scan and verify.
For each browser, you can list your favorite sites and, subsequently, you can press the green button to start the process of checking existing or dead websites and web pages .
The time required to verify the complete collection obviously depends on the number of favorites that have accumulated over time.
At the end, the program indicates in the "Status" column the sites that are no longer active or that show errors
You can sort the errors by placing them at the top of the list and checking them before removing them.
After validating the links, you can choose to remove the bad links all together.
Favicons can be controlled in the same way by pressing the button next to them.
The search for duplicates and duplicates of favorites starts with the appropriate button; in this case, be careful and check the duplicates also with the eyes before removing them.
AM-DeadLink also allows you to backup your favorites by saving them all in a zip file.
For other browsers, instead, you must use the HTML export functionality of the favorites and check them by loading the file into the AM-DeadLink program.
Once the HTML file has been cleaned up, they can then be imported back into the browser used.
For Google Chrome there is an extension that checks and removes favorite sites that no longer respond or that open with error, also reporting duplicate ones.
It's called Bookmark Check and it makes a complete list of sites that no longer exist allowing the user to check them manually and remove them (be careful that only those with error 404 are really no longer present, while the others may have temporary connection problems).
It also allows you to delete bookmarks that are present two or more times in bookmarks.
On Firefox, on the other hand, an excellent add-on for checking bookmarks and cleaning up favorites that are no longer active is 404 Bookmarks, which signals and allows you to delete all the favorite sites that no longer exist, with a 404 error.
Now you can finally rearrange your favorites, delete old and no longer good ones and remove duplicates and duplicates.
