Okay, I’ll admit it: my Internet Explorer (IE) "Favorites" list has gotten completely out of control. I have many broken links and useless junk in there, so the idea of cleaning it out has always seemed like way too much work. (The "Organize Favorites" feature is a pain to use while you are surfing.) Of course, my problem hasn’t gone away; it just gets worse the longer I put it off. If I were really organized, when I found a problem Favorites link, I’d just right click the entry and click Delete, but over the years I haven’t done that. Hence the big mess. I now have developed a sort of secondary mental list that tells me…"hmm, I don’t think that link works." Some would argue that defeats the purpose of bookmarking a site in the first place.
Anyway, I found a nifty tip that may help me finally fix my problem. In IE 5.5 you can export your favorites list. Choose File|Import and Export and you access a Wizard that gives you the option of importing or exporting all your favorites. If you choose Export, you have to choose a folder to put the file into. I have my Favorites organized into a lot of subfolders, so I saw a list of all my folders under the Favorites folder. If you pick Favorites from the list (as I did) all of the Favorites are exported. Alternatively, you can just choose to export only the favorites from a particular subfolder.
The wizard creates a Web page out of your favorites list and puts it on your hard disk in the location you specified in the wizard. Then you can go back to IE and open the file (choose File|Open and browse to the file on your disk). The links are clickable, so if you are connected to the Internet, they’ll go to the locations. If you use Netscape, you can also import the favorites list into Netscape (in Netscape 4.7, click Bookmarks|Edit Bookmarks, then File|Import and find the file you exported from IE).
I plan to print out the page, get on-line, open my exported favorites file, then click the links and see which ones work. Then I can just cross off the ones on the printout and later (off-line) go into Organize Favorites and clean up my mess.