Add descriptions to your bookmarks (and other improvements)
Here at start.me HQ we are working on some really cool things. Those features will still need some love and work. In the mean time, we did some work on the Bookmarks widget and added some really nice features and improvements.
Context menu
A lot of time is spent editing, organizing and deleting bookmarks. To make that as easy as possible, we added a nice context menu to bookmarks. How does it work? Simple: just right click on a bookmark and you will be presented with a menu that allows you to directly edit or delete it. A great productivity hack. In the future, we plan to offer broader context menu support.
Hint: On Android tablets and smartphones, the context menu can be opened by ‘tapping and holding’ a bookmark: put your finger on the bookmark and hold for about 1 second. iPhone and iPad support will follow later.
Adding descriptions
We got a lot of requests of people who wanted to be able to add a description to their bookmarks. Descriptions can both be useful as a reminder of what a site is about, but can also help to explain to visitors of your public page what a specific site is about and why it may be valuable to them.
So we added support for descriptions. When you edit a bookmark, you will now be able to enter a description as well. Our backend system tries to automatically find a fitting description for your links, so you will often find a description already specified.
The description for each bookmark can be seen by hovering over the bookmark. A tooltip will show with the full description of the bookmark. Alternatively, you could use our…
New detailed list view
In addition to the three view modes (list, icons, large icons) already supported by the Bookmark widget we added a fourth one: detailed list. In this mode, every bookmark will show both its title and description. You are able to choose whether you just want the first line of the description or the full text.
We are very excited about this new view, as it opens up a lot of new use cases, for example:
- Creating a list of interesting books, specifying a short summary as a description to help you quickly find the book you need;
- Adding reviews of sites, advising visitors of your public page on sites to visit;
- Specifying when you last visited a particular site (perhaps of a competitor), helping you decide what sites you want to visit soon;
- Writing tutorials for students, showing them step-by-step how to perform a specific task.
You can probably add some more exciting ideas to this list. Please let us know what you came up with!
26 Replies to “Add descriptions to your bookmarks (and other improvements)”
Werk al sinds het begin met Start.me. Voor mij een ideale manier om mijn web-werk te organiseren. Natuurlijk meteen voor de Premium gegaan maar…toch even benieuwd naar wat meer informatie betreffende ‘your data will be backed up automatically`. Ok, tot nu toe steeds trouw de `export-functie` gebruikt om mijn Start.me gegevens veilig te backuppen. Maar, dat hoeft nu niet meer? Alles veilig in de wolken? Ik zie nergens iets betreffende deze automatische backup functie. Wat doe ik als mijn systeem crasht? Toont mijn Start.me in het nieuwe hergeinstalleerde systeem meteen na het inloggen trouw mijn bookmarks en andere gegevens, zonder dat ik iets hoef te importeren? Ik zou graag iets meer willen weten over dit nieuwe, niet onbelangrijke Premium xtraatje!
I’ve been toying with the bookmarks feature. I used it to make a virtual “book shelf” of books. The links take you to an amazon or google search of the book title and author. I scrubbed images of the book covers off the web and used them as the icon for each link. This works well but the icons are a little small. I wonder if you could add some layout choices to make the images bigger? That’d allow folks to use the bookmarks tool as an image carousel etc. Thanks!
I’ve been trying that myself as well. Quite a nice application for it. We have a lot of plans still for the bookmarks widget. More control over icon size is certainly one of them!
The larger icons are there already. They were long on our backlog. Today, we just did it 😉 http://blog.start.me/2015/11/more-layout-options-for-bookmarks-widget/
How about the option to DISABLE the context menu?
Not all of us actually want this function, and it interferes with both the normal right click function in Chrome, and also with Mouse Gestures.
Hi,
Please e-mail your start.me username to support@start.me, so we can disable the context menus in your account now.
Best regards,
Luuk
I am so frustrated by new “click options” on bookmarks… I open dozens of tabs at a time from my start page — which previously I could do (with my mac) using right-click+open new tab — but now I get only “open in new window” and worse than that it automatically kicks me to that new tab even though I want to stay on my start page…. very frustrating to have a workflow system (the reason i left Delicious and committed to Start in the first place) that gets changed. Adding features is great, but upsetting or ditching very simple functions and calling it progress is just silly. Hope it can be fixed soon.
Hi,
We decided to make the context menus optional. I have disabled it in your account now. Please confirm it’s working normally for your again.
Best regards,
Luuk
Hi,
Please e-mail your start.me username to support@start.me, so we can disable the context menus in your account now.
Best regards,
Luuk
It’d be nice if just holding down shift or control while right-clicking would give the normal browser right-click menu.
Hi John. That sounds like a great idea. We’ll put it on our backlog!
Hi John. Your idea has been realized! From now on, the browser context menu will shown when you right-click while holding Shift, Control or Command.
@Jon – Actually I just discovered, by reading this blog comments thread, a neat and handy trick that gets exactly the functionality you want from Luuk’s posting above (October 29, 2015 / 19:36).
You can click several links while staying on the same start.me page (or on any web page) by simply holding down the Ctrl key while clicking the links on that one page.
That trick is actually immensely helpful at work (as I just now confirmed by remoting into work and trying it using Firefox). I was able to be on a page listing stores that hadn’t logged in with their data for several days. Instead of having to use a right-click to open each in a separate, additional tab, I just held down the Ctrl key and clicking merrily away opening up the top 10 worst stores all while staying on that first, main page!
Thanks Luuk !!!
Preferred when right clicking a link and clicking open, I still stayed on the startme page.
Now I have to go back and forward.
Hi Brian,
Thank you for your feedback.
Today we have added an “open in new window” link to the context menu. Have you seen this? Does this work for you?
That would be great if focus remained on the original window – or, at least, if there were an option to allow focus to remain on the original window or go to the newly-opened window, at the user’s choice.
Nice changes, Michiel!
I’m gonna try them this week and the next one, and —if I think of something perfectible— I’ll let you know here.
I like the new features, however, there is one that I would REALLY like. When you switched to https from http, you broke nearly all of my dashboards. I have struggled to replace these (badly) by not using Start.me.
I really wish that you would provide an option to load a page from http rather than https, as https pages face severe content restrictions.
@GYLVER, try just adding the “s” into the overall link (that is to say, change your links from http:// to https://). That has worked for me every time so far.
So, for example, if you type “pbs.org” into a web browser and wait for the web page to load, you will see just “www.pbs.org” displayed in Google Chrome web browser (- normal behavior from Google Chrome).
Then if you click that URL in the web browser address bar (so it all highlights) and cut and paste that link into Notepad, you will see it to actually be this – http://www.pbs.org/ – the actual URL link you ended at for just entering “pbs.org” into the web browser.
So now, as an experiment, edit that link in Notepad to simply add an “s”, like this – https://www.pbs.org/ – and then cut and paste that slightly modified URL back into the web browser to see if it works. It will. And, okay, in this example, the PBS server will actually change the link BACK to http://www.pbs.org/ – but at least you still got there with no problem.
: )
How do I open links on a new window if everytime I right click the only option I have is EDIT or OPEN? Hate it.
Hi Isa
Thank you for your response. We have received this kind of feedback from others as well and will look into this ASAP.
Tip: When you hold CTRL while you click the link, it will open the link in a new window/tab.
best regards
Luuk
start.me
ISA,
Have you tried clicking the mouse mid button / wheel? 😉
Still waiting (and hoping) for the capability to change the content of the bookmark after adding the URL. It is beyond inefficient to first add the bookmark, close the dialog, and then have to click on the newly-added bookmark just to edit it.
How changing the Add Bookmarks dialog to add an Edit Bookmark window that follows the “Specify URLs, one per line” window?
Great idea and we’ll implement this logic in the “Add Bookmark” dialog asap.
This is awesome!! Thanks so much for continuing to make a great tool better and better…
How about changing the color of a link for an RSS feed once it’s been clicked. Then next time you load the RSS widget the link will always show as thought it’s been clicked on. Right now it’s per browser per machine.