Birthday Cards

One of the difficult things about birthdays is knowing what to do with the cards one receives when the time comes for them to be taken off the sideboard. This year, as usual, I had some lovely cards. A lot of thought had obviously been put into choosing them. This one, from GB, catered for my love of photography and nature and is of that intelligent mollusc, the Nautilus.



The last couple of years I have scanned my favourite cards into the computer and put them into my computer diary. But that still leaves the card itself for which to find a use. Some are too good simply to be put in the recycling bag. I have used old ones as bookmarks and this year I decided to ‘formalise’ that by cutting some of them to bookmark size and laminating them.

That Favourites Problem

Most people I know have a load of favorites (sic) / bookmarks and are presented with two problems. Firstly, because they use two machines (or more) the link they are after may not be on the machine they are using. Secondly, they are disorganised. (The bookmarks not the people!) The principal example of that is having differently named folders on the different machines and not bothering to label them correctly because it is easier just to hit the ‘add to favorites’ button.

I have a way around this that I have used from my earliest computing days. It consists of a webpage with my links on it. This can either be stored on all machines and updated from one to the other as and when or can be uploaded to a website. Although I use the former method, the latter is preferable since it stops the problem of having two different sets of amendments going at the same time which can easily lead to losing the latest additions to one machine. I use the latter method for Jo’s page to save me accessing her machine and anything she wants added she can just e-mail to me.

It lacks the immediacy of hitting the favorites button but tends to make you more disciplined in what you decide you are really likely to revisit and has the advantage of adding value judgements by either positioning or direct text.

All that has to be done then is to make this the home page in your browser and ‘hey presto’ easy access to all your favourite sites...