My kingdom for an inter-page bookmarking module for Mozilla browsers.

August 1, 2007 by Deightine.

I have over the years become pretty well acquainted with programming and design structures, design of all sorts is a hobby of mine. Lately I’ve spent a lot of time up to my eyes in fairly dense evolutionary psychology treatises and a lot of readings around cognitive, behavioural and affective neurosciences. Yes, I know for a lot of people that sounds like more headache than hobby… But I assure you, for me, this is the bread and butter of reading. I love this stuff. One might hazard that there was an evolutionary shift a million years ago that created a proclivity for wanting to know why people do things… And I’m one of the latest in a long line of individuals trying to figure out what the hell people were thinking when they did something stupid.

But while in the midst of my readings, I realized something… I have the worst time remembering where I am in a given text after reading halfway or so, unless I have clear chapter headings to work off of. If I were reading a traditional book, I would simply slide in my bookmark and make up for half of a page I’d have to re-read later… But instead, when a page on the web is halfway finished it can be equivalent of being half way through a 200 page novel. And yes, I can bookmark the page… All 200 novel-pages of it. But I cannot save where I am within the document itself.

What I would like, and I’m adding this to my wishlist, is a Firefox extension that lets me right-click and drop an in-line bookmark that attaches to the page’s bookmark in my list. In essense, I want to put down an anchor to automatically go to the next time I want to read the page. One that I can move down, physically, through the document as I go and refer to later when I need to read some more. It wouldn’t have to be pretty (I’m not going to be picky), but it would definitely need to be more than a one shot use type of extension. In effect, storing my “current” bookmark on the page in a list of bookmarks attached within the programs -actual- bookmark.

Not sure how that would effect the current program when it comes to programs that collect and share your bookmarks, etc, but I know it would help me out a lot at this end.

In effect, it would be like when you’re reading a Shakespearian work of fiction, a play or something, and you can refer to “Act 1, line 365″ or something of that sort. Instead, the bookmark would catalog it for you an store it for later. And maybe when you display your bookmarks, it would slightly change the color of the font or the background behind the bookmark’s title to reflect that you’re not finished reading it yet in case you forget something important. And then you could go into the bookmark’s properties and clear all of the bookmarks or perhaps right-click the floating bookmark layer and click ‘Remove Bookmark Anchor’ or something to remove it.

Who knows, someone might wander across this at some point and point out an extension I don’t know about or decide they could use it too and being not -too- much work… pony one up. I just don’t have the time myself right now to sit and try to make that happen. Maybe if I have time later… but I doubt it.

Example:

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