CheckPlaces -- Check for Bad Bookmarks from Firefox
If you are like me, you have a huge collection of bookmarks in Firefox. I have some that I bookmarked years ago. I really need to go through my 1500+ bookmarks, look at each one, and decide if I still need it. However, I know this is something I will probably never have time to do. With CheckPlaces, I can at least let Firefox check each bookmark to be sure the web site still exists. While there are programs that do this (including some commercial ones that cost far more than the task is worth), it is nice to be able to do this within Firefox.
CheckPlaces is easy to use. You can let it check all your bookmarks or just select specific folders for bookmarks you wish to check. The first time I used CheckPlaces I had it check all 1500+ bookmarks. This only took about 6 minutes on my 6 meg cable connection. It was very fast. Unfortunately, it returned far too many errors for easy decision-making. I allowed it to delete all the bookmarks with DNS errors (server no longer exists), but decided I would go folder-by-folder on the other errors so I could view the error for each bookmark and decide what to do. Checking a folder usually only took a few seconds and returned a much shorter list of errors, making it easy to check each page listed with and error and decide what to do with the bookmark.
Sadly, this process only reduced the size of my bookmark list by a couple of hundred. I still really need to make the time to go through the list by hand and eliminate those I will never use again. CheckPlaces, however, did what it was supposed to do in a very efficient manner and running it once a month of so will at least remove dead sites from my bookmarks.
Rating: 4.0
Operating System: Any Firefox
License: Open Source
Price: Free
Version: 1.62
Web Site: http://www.andyhalford.com/checkplaces/
