Tips & Tricks, Duplicate Finder

One of the nice features that helps you cleanup your bookmarks is the Duplicate Finder. Now before we go into the details of the Duplicate Finder, I’d like to define what a duplicate bookmark is. A duplicate bookmarks is a bookmark in your collection that has the same url, also known as location, for a website but has a different name and/or lives in a seperate folder.

Normally when you add a bookmark to linkaGoGo through the ‘Add to linkaGoGo’ script or the Add menu, it will warn you that a bookmark with that url already exists and in what folder it lives. So once you use linkaGoGo as your bookmark manager the changes are relative slim that you will create duplicate bookmarks.

However when you just imported your bookmarks into linkaGoGo, either from you local Internet Explorer favorites or from another bookmark manager, the chances are high that there will be duplicates. Note during the import you can indicate that you don’t want to import duplicates. The downside of doing this during the import is that you can’t control which one it will not import. So I advise to not check that during the import, but to import your bookmarks and then run the Duplicate Finder to remove any duplicates.

The Duplicate Finder will find all your duplicate bookmarks and orders them in a list by the url and groups the duplicates together. It also displays the name, whether it is a favorite, when you added and last visited the bookmark, and often you visited the bookmark.

So how do you now clean up these duplicate bookmarks? Here comes the magic of ‘Edit’ mode to the rescue. If you are not already in ‘Edit’ mode when starting the Duplicate Finder, you can enter Edit mode by clicking on the Edit link in the little description at the top of the Duplicate Finder screen.

When Duplicate Finder is in Edit mode it displays every bookmark with a checkbox. You can now easily mark bookmarks. At the top of the screen you see a toolbar. The toolbar has a move and a delete button. It also has a picklist of folders. So if you want to move the duplicates to a folder called ‘Review later’ for example, select that folder and click the Move button. If you just want to delete the Marked duplicates click on the Delete button and all the checked bookmarks can be deleted.

You can find the Duplicate Finder in the Tools section, on the left side of your linkaGoGo Home page (Make sure you have Tools section enabled under the Option/Page Style tab).

As you can see with the Duplicate Finder you have an easy way to quickly identify and cleanup your duplicate bookmarks.

GoGolian