Most Opera users should already know how to use bookmarks, the personal bar, and speed dial, but from my own experiences, I feel that I did not get the best value out of them. As I started using them more, I began to keep my tab bar less and less cluttered.
Some of you will be happy to have many tabs open. How much time do you spend trying to find your tab, because it gets buried in the other tabs? How often have you clicked on a tab, only to find that you clicked on the wrong tab?
Read the remainder of the blog entry to see my suggestions.
Bookmarks
A simple bookmark tip is to use subdirectories. The most rarely used bookmarks should be buried deep in subfolders. The deepest bookmark that I have is 2 subfolders below a main folder.
Another simple bookmark tip is to have 2 "Misc" folders; the second is a subfolder of the first. The idea is that some misc. stuff is used much less than the regular misc. stuff.
The last simple bookmark tip that I have is to have a "To Read" folder. Every now and then, I find an interesting page that I want to read, but it is not a priority right now. I just save the page to my "To Read" folder, and then I can close the page, and keep my tab bar tidy.
Sessions
I found that I often left tabs open, because I want to monitor the progress of my stocks or the amount of visitors that my web site would get. In many cases, I do not really need to keep the tab open. As long as I can return to a certain page, and see the progress, then I am okay. In the case of stocks, it would be pointless to have a session, because the web page will not be preserved. However, for something like Google Analytics, it makes sense. I want to see the exact same page each time. Also, keeping it open and reloading in the background would only slow my browser down. Also, if I could save 2 seconds every time I use the tab bar, because I do not have to be distracted by the Google Analytics tab, then I might save 4-10 seconds in an hour. So spending a couple of seconds to open up a session would still leave me with a net savings.
In the case of Google Analytics, I want fresh data, every time I open it. When I open up my Google Analytics session, it opens up to the exact page with fresh data. Therefore, keeping a tab open is extremely wasteful.
Keeping my Google Analytics session properly saved was tricky the first few times. Therefore, let me explain it to you. Once, each day, I change the dates of the page to monitor the current day, and then click on any of the main analytics links, and then middle-click on "Dashboard" to open a new tab. I close the old tabs. I then save the session as, "Google Analytics". I choose to overwrite the existing session file, because the existing session file is now out of date, and unnecessary. This process sounds more complex than it really is. The idea is that I make sure that loading the session will always load the current date's analytics information. These pages, technically, could be saved as a folder of bookmarks, but it would be easier to do it with sessions, so that I could copy over the old session, instead of deleting old bookmarks.
Personal Bar
The personal bar seems to be very useful. I think of it as a tool belt for my most commonly used bookmarks. It is not meant to be permanent storage for all your bookmarks. In other words, if you find that you are not using something once per week, or more, then it is in your best interest to hide it in the bookmarks menu. The idea is that the less bookmarks you see on your personal bar, the easier it is to find it.
Speed Dial
Speed dial is similar, in that you want to only put something there that you will use a lot. Also, you want to only put things there that you can monitor. Perhaps you want to see if the forum has any messages or replies to you. Perhaps you want to see if there are any new blog entries. Speed dial is not good for telling you how many messages you have, or how many blog entries you have. It only tells you that there are some. Speed dial is good for that, so that you will not have to open up a new tab.
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