I just deleted most of my bookmarks.

I’ve been meaning to do that for a while, mostly because I barely ever use 99% of them, but they’re also something people notice when using someone else’s computer. I didn’t have anything embarrassing , but there were a lot of really dated links and general clutter. Most of the time I just hit Google first anyway.

Some notables:

• News folder containing 62 bookmarks to various newspapers and tv news stations. Totally obsoleted by the rise of blogs and RSS.
• All sorts of little JavaScript bookmarklet scraps with various incredibly descriptive names like “js”, “yt”, “break google”, “test”, “script inject”, etc.
• A link to a wonderful Ruby tutorial I read several years ago, now a book.
• Instructions for applying gzip compression to all pages of a site with php and htaccess. Used once last summer, reduced Ben’s bandwidth usage by 80%.
• A link to Everything2, which was a lot of fun in the pre-Wikipedia 90s but I hadn’t visited since sometime in early 2001.
• Links (several defunct) to indexes of Logical Fallacies, from back when I wasted time arguing on the Internet.
• I’m keeping the blogs folder for now. I would really like to go through that and see what I used to read, who I remember and what I now find appalling. There’s 61 blogs in there, I’m really only checking a small handful these days and generally just type their urls directly.

Update: it took a few days to get used to where the stuff I kept was. This stuff had been there so long that I was just clicking the middle of the bookmark bar out of habit, a week later it’s still throwing me off to have different words up there.