Strangechord

For months now, I’ve been using a fabulous free web utility called Furl. It’s sort of like bookmarking, but ten times better. It’s a filing cabinet for web pages you want to remember. Impressive features:

• You drag this little link onto your browser “Links” toolbar and then any time you come across a web page you want to save, click on that link and a pop-up box prompts you for category, read status, comments, rating, and more. Then you hit save and that’s it! When you view your “furls”, you can sort them by category, date, read/unread, etc.

• Because when you furl a page, it caches the page, you can use the full text search tool to look keywords up across all of your furls. This is handy too for furling pages like New York Times articles, which start to charge a fee after a few weeks. Furl saves the page in memory and you can access this saved version.

• Check out my Furl member page. It automatically sorts by reverse-chronological date, but you can choose a category out of the list of 47 I’ve created, such as “Erotic”, “Sociology”, or “Interviews”. It’s replaced my bookmarks.

• A really cool thing about Furl is that you can view others members’ furls and there’s even a syndication (RSS feed) link for each member. For example, I’m subscribed to Jeremy’s Furl page. Or you can opt to sign up to receive a daily e-mail of a member’s furls. Right off one of Furl’s main pages are lists of most recently furled by members and most popular furls by members.

• This feature is awesome: with a little copy and paste javascript code, bloggers can display their furls on their sites. Jeremy’s done this with different categories in the left column on his blog. This is a great way to do a side mini-blog, as Jeremy shows.