Choosing a Desktop Bookmark Manager

I start my morning by checking my email and RSS reader. Then, I'm off to the forums. Next, I check on social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) That's at least 10 different websites in the first hour of my day.

I could remember what I need to check, memorize the URLs, and type them in every morning. Or, I could bookmark the websites I need to visit and organize them for efficiency.

There are still some people who rely on their browsers, be it Internet Explorer, Firefox, or another, to manage their bookmarks, but I believe that most have turned to external bookmark managers, online or off.

Bookmark managers allow a user to organize bookmarks outside of the browser, while still interacting with the browser for convenience. Managers are also a safety measure: If the bookmarks saved to the browser were lost, you'd have to start all over, remembering what you had saved and why.

Bookmark managers can be online (web-based) or offline (desktop). Desktop bookmark managers allow you to edit and organize links even when you're not connected to the Internet.

Here are three desktop bookmark managers to keep you organized and secure.

Link Commander is a browser-independent bookmark manager that lets you sort bookmarks into collections. It has a search function and an area to add link descriptions. Collecting links is easy, since it monitors both the browser and the clipboard. It's also very simple to move collections from one computer to another. Windows only.

Bookmark Master is a free tool for managing bookmarks in Internet Explorer. You can add keywords to a link and get all kinds of information about a link, like validity, accessed time, connect info, and webpage title. By checking link validity, Bookmark Master can help you weed out old links when the websites cease to exist.

Eluma keeps websites, blogs, and RSS feeds neatly organized. It's more social than most other desktop-based bookmark managers: you can share collections and find bookmarks that others have shared. Links can be organized in many different ways: tags, folders, ratings or flagged items. If you install Eluma on multiple machines, you can easily sync bookmark collections across computers. It works with Firefox or Internet Explorer on Windows.

Desktop bookmarks managers are usually preferred by people who are not comfortable with saving information online, but don't trust the browser to keep their links safe and/or would like additional options for their bookmarks. The downside is that if you move around between multiple computers a lot, you will have to find ways to sync your links.