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Organise your favourites under AOL
Do you remember that site you came across last week? Perhaps, you’d like to visit it again? The problem is remembering all those pesky web addresses or, to give them their proper name, Uniform Resource Locators (URLS.) The AOL 5 user has a simple trick up his sleeve in the form of the Favourites feature. This lets you store a URL, or indeed the location of any of AOL’s proprietary content, in a list of Favourites. Once stored, you can return to that place by selecting that item from the Favourites list. How to remember a favourite place. To store Practical PC as a Favourite you first need to make sure you are looking at Practical PC’s content Next, press Control-++. That’s the control key and then the plus key twice. It brings up a screen which offers three options:
As an alternative to Control-++ you can also drag the favourites heart icon from the top right corner of the open window up to the Favourites button on the toolbar. How to return to a favourite place. Once you have stored a favourite place in your favourites list you can return to it at any time by selecting the favourites button on the toolbar. A list of favourites will be displayed – just doubleclick on the entry to which you wish to return or click once and then select the GO icon under the favourites list. How to organise your favourites. As your list of favourites builds up you may wish to organise them into folders. You may, for example, wish to create a folder called Computers to store any favourites that relate to computing. To do this, first select Favourite Places from the favourites list. This displays a list of sites. Then click on the New icon and create a new folder called Computing. You can now drag any favourites from the list and drop them into the new Computing folder. Try to give the favourites meaningful names – the ones generated automatically may not mean much to you a few days later. To rename a favourite, first select Favourite Places as above, then select the item to be renamed and then click the Edit button. You can change the description to something more meaningful. Be careful not to change the Internet Address field. If you want to re-order the favourites or their folders you can just drag each one into its new position but it can be fiddly if you have many entries. There are some limitations with the Favourites function of AOL. One is that you can not sort the favourites automatically into order. Another is that the favourites can only be accessed when using AOL. If you require more sophisticated functions, then you should consider using Microsoft’s free Internet Explorer alongside AOL. A third approach is to use a web-based utility such as Murl.com which you can access at http://murl.com/ Murl.com allows you to store your favourites, or bookmarks as they call them, on the Murl.com web server, rather than on your hard disk. This means that they are available to you regardless of what computer you use to access the web. For example, you can create an entry at home and then use it from work. Entries are properly backed up and so will also be protected from a PC disk crash. Utilities on the Murl.com web site allow you to copy URLs easily to Murl.com while surfing. You can even upload all your favourites from Internet Explorer to Murl.com although I did experience some difficulties in getting this to work. It’s not all perfect - Murl.com can be slow at times. Also I’m not aware of a way to share favourites between AOL and Internet Explorer and finally, Internet Explorer and Murl.com will only work with true web sites and not AOL content written for members. Happy browsing!
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Kai
Chandler reminisces about his favourite places.