On any trip, you need a way to track where have you been. Such
is true for your trip on the World Wide Web as well. Fortunately,
there is away to "mark" your spot on the web, and even a
tracking device that shows you exactly where you have been on the
web, and those are all built into your web browser!
Bookmarks / Favorites
Bookmarks and Favorites are the same: they refer to a way for
you to "mark" a specific web page, so you can jump back
to it directly. It was originally called a "bookmark"
because it works the same way... Put a bookmark in a book, and you
can instantly go back to the exact page you are on. On the web you
deal with web pages, so the first browsers used the term
"bookmarks". Then came Microsoft, who decided to rename
it "favorites" for its own Internet Explorer.
Bookmarks and Favorites are the same. From now on, I'll just
say "bookmark". Those of you using Internet Explorer can
rest assured that I mean "favorites" as well.
So how do you set and use a bookmark? First, go to the web page
you wish to bookmark. Then, in Netscape, you click on Bookmark,
then select "Add Bookmark". Or in Internet Explorer, you
click on Favorites, and select "Add Favorites".
An even simpler way is to press Control-D. That bookmarks the
current page immediately. For those of you who are not used to
hitting control keys, hold down the Control Key (sometimes marked
Ctrl) like the way you hold down the "shift" key for
capital letters, then press and release the D key, and release the
control key.
Go ahead and try it on this web page. Press Ctrl-D, or use the
menu. You may be prompted for a title of the bookmark. Just press
enter and the browser will use the page's title as the bookmark
title as well.
The Bookmarked page will appear in the list of your bookmarks
when you click on the bookmarks menu.
Now go to some other web page, then choose your new bookmarked
page from the bookmark menu. Voila! You're back to the bookmarked
page!
Keep track of your favorite websites this way, so you can go
back to them quickly instead of going through search engines and
such.
Most browsers also allow you to organize your bookmarks into
different categories. Pull down the "bookmark" menu
(favorites menu on Internet Explorer) and you'll see
"organize bookmarks".
Select that, and you can create folders to categorize your
bookmarks, like news, personal, legal, computer, health, and more.
Then just drag your bookmarks into the appropriate folders, and
you can access them easier.
If a particular bookmark is no longer important to you, go into
"organize bookmarks" menu, and remove the bookmark.
Beware, once removed, it can no longer be retrieved.
Bookmarks can be VERY useful. However, what if you need to get
back to a website or web page you visited before, but you didn't
bookmark it? Is there a way to find it again? There is... It's
called "browser history".
Backtracking on the web
Your web browser (Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator)
keeps a history of each and every page you've visited for the past
several weeks and months. And you can access the history to help
you locate a page you have visited before.
In both Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer, the
"history" is accessed by pressing Control-H. A window
will pop-up and show you all the websites you've visited recently,
in chronological order. You can then go through the list and
search for the site you are looking for.
Not all browsers keep the same amount of data. Some computers
may save data for months, while others only keep data for a few
days. So try it, and see how much history your browser kept for
you.
Both Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator allow you to sort
the results by specific fields, like by last visited, by name, by
URL, and so on. That will help you narrow down your choices.
Now, you can look up that website you've found by accident a
while back, and now you can bookmark it so you can go back any
time you like!
Conclusion
With bookmarks and history, you can "mark" your
favorite spots on the web, and be able to get back to them without
memorizing long URLs. You can also track your web journey and
backtrack at any time.
Have fun exploring, and I'll see you on the web.
