Linqto.me - online favorites and notes manager

Linqto.me has not only allowed the management of your bookmarks in the Cloud, independently of any device or browser, with full search capabilities for more than 10 years now, but we also allow you to store notes and attach your bookmarks to them. You may even make the notes with their associated bookmarks public to create a bookmark url list like explained here. And since we are on the topic of creating and, or editing notes, we would like to make you familiar with a feature that has been around for some time already: full screen editing.

Screen real-estate is valuable, and the more space you have to do work, the better. This is why, instead of just giving you an edit window that is constrained to a small size, and have you scroll left and right and up and down to input your notes, the editor in Linqto.me allows for full-screen editing.

To make use of this feature, simply:

• Create a new Note in your www.linqto.me account or edit an existing Note by selecting it from the list of notes or search results, and then selecting the 'Edit' button atop the Note.
• Once in the Edit mode, the ribbon at the top of the 'Note Contents' section will display. On the second row of the ribbon, you will find a button () that indicates 'FullScreen'
• Clicking this will allow the 'Note Contents' editor to take up the full width and height of your browser window on the screen.

• If you wish to return to normal editing, simply click the () button again and exit the full screen mode again.

Tip: if you need even more real-estate on the screen, you can also switch your browser into full screen mode. For most browsers (including Chrome, Edge and Firefox) this can be done by simply pressing the F11 key when working on a Windows PC, or Mac.

When doing research on a topic on the web, many a times, you will need to create a group of bookmarks (favorites) to articles and resources that you have found useful in your research. Being able to publish these and share them with others in one operation is something that www.linqto.me can help you with.

Not only can you make use of www.linqto.me to save bookmarks and access them anywhere from any device, index and search for them afterwards, but you can also create lists of bookmarks associated with a specific topic and publish them online. In this article we will walk you through how simple this can be done.

Step 1:

Create a few bookmarks to things and resources that are interesting for you. You may consider adding the www.linqto.me bookmarklet to your browser so you can quickly bookmark resources without leaving the page you are reading. See the following article for more details on this.

Step 2:

Create a note with a succinct (or not so succinct) description of the topic you are doing research on. You may consider adding keywords to both the note and the bookmarks so that they can be found while searching for content within your personal archive.

Step 3:

Associate the bookmarks (favorites) with the newly created note. To do this, simply click the 'pin' icon next to the 'New' 'Edit' and 'Delete' buttons available on top of a note.

This will take you do the list of bookmarks you have recently added to www.linqto.me. Notice that each bookmark now has a 'pin' icon to the left which, when clicked, will associate the bookmark to the note.



You can continue adding more bookmarks to the same note by clicking the 'pin' icon in front of them. The floating window at the bottom of the screen will show you just how many bookmarks are associated with the current Note. When you have finished, you can just click the 'Close X' button on the floating window and be returned to the Note that you have created.

However, the 'Recently Created Bookmarks' bookmarks view is not the only way in which you can create a bookmark list. Once you have clicked on the pin icon from the Note you wish yo add favorites to, you can also use the 'Search' feature from www.linqto.me to search for bookmarks you have created previously. Just click the 'Search My' button and do a search for favorites you have created under your account. The 'pin' button will also appear in front of each result of a search you perform allowing you to associate multiple bookmarks with the note in the same way.

All that is left now is to share your newly created note (along with the associated bookmarks) to any website where you would like to post your content. You can achieve this quickly with the Share control located at the bottom of the page, which gives you quick access to posting the note to social media sites.

If not, you can also use the 'Copy' next to the url of the note to copy the url into the clipboard and then paste it on the site you are sharing the bookmark list to.

The Linqto.me Team

In January 2020 we launched a newer version of the Online Bookmarking Service www.linqto.me – this one has bene in the works for a few months now and is finally ready for our users to experience. In this new version we have made ample yet subtle changes to the way in which you can register or login to our website.

The first experience you have with www.linqto.me is creating your account (you can do this for free by clicking on the New User link: https://www.linqto.me/User/New). In the old system, a cumbersome security question had to be filled in and we asked our users to memorize the answer to this question should they lose their password and wish to reset their account. This is no longer the case, the registration procedure has been simplified: just pick a username, a display name and a password and you are ready to go.

In the old version of the website, following the creation of your account, www.linqto.me would send you a recap email with the account details, which also included the password you setup for your new account. In the new version, since this email contains confidential information, we send it via a secure connection to your email server. For example, if you use Gmail, with the older version of www.linqto.me you can see that the email was not encrypted before it was sent, so anyone could intercept it and read the content. This is not the case with the new system.

We have also removed the password information that was enclosed in the above email, so that it would not be accidentally revealed if someone gained access to your email account.

Also as part of the securing of the login process, we have made sure that all account passwords are more complex. A password is now required to:

• Have at least 8 characters in length
• Contain an upper- and lower-case letter
• Contain a digit
• Have a symbol (non alpha-numeric) character (like @ ^ _ …)
  

If your password already met these criteria when we upgrade to the new account management system, the website will just transfer your existing account into the new login provider. If not, you will be asked to provide a new account password via a dialog box like the one below when logging in:

One a new password is provided you are on your way and can continue to access all the contents you already had linked to your account with no changes.

If you lost your account password or your account was locked out, re-initializing the password was quite complex: you would need to remember the answer to the security question you provided once during the registration process. If you did not remember what answer you provided, your password would be lost. Also, if you locked our account out because of two many invalid login attempts, your account would remain locked out until a site Administrator would unlock it for you.

Today, the password reset mechanism has been simplified: simply provide your account email or username and we will send you an email with a password reset link inside, which will allow you to login and setup a new password. Please note that this only works if your account email has been verified.

If you lockout your account because of too many unsuccessful login attempts, we also clearly notify you on the login page, as well as via email that your account has been locked out. The email you receive will also provide you with clear instructions on how to unlock the account and be able to continue using www.linqto.me again.

The Linqto.me Team

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When you decide to store and use your favorites collection in the Cloud with www.linqto.me you are giving us data that would otherwise be on your computer, tablet or smart-phone. You may ask: what do we do with this data, where is it stored and how do we use it?

TL;DR answer: nothing, we store it and help you organize it so you can access it from anywhere.

Longer answer: the data you share with www.linqto.me is stored on our servers in a data-center located in the Netherlands. The servers are owned and operated by Linqto.me and only Linqto.me service members are allowed to access these servers to maintain and ensure their smooth operation. The data is stored securely in our relation database and is encrypted, so even staff that accesses the server does not have the ability to read the data from an account.

The data transfer between the www.linqto.me servers and the devices (computers, tables or smart phones) with which you use to navigate the site with is also secured. The site uses TLS (Transport Layer Security) based on the TLS 1.2 protocol, to make sure that no one can peak at the data the site is sending you or you are sending the site.

We do not share the data stored on our servers for your account with any third-party entities. The data is used only to allow the website to display your bookmarks and notes back to you, via the different views that are available in the system (like the My Dashboard view, where you can organize your bookmark collection based on several criteria).

The only time we share bookmarks and notes with third parties is when you mark these items as being public. When you click the 'Note is publicly listed' or 'Link is publicly accessible' checkboxes, these items will become available to the Notes public index or the Bookmarks public index on the www.linqto.me website. These indexes are available to everyone and anyone who accesses the site at any given time: this includes search engines and tools used to record the state of a website at a given time.

When rendering a bookmark, note or folder public, these are also made available in the Bookmarks or Notes public search feature on www.linqto.me, while the folders that you have shared publicly will be available on your profile page. The same is true for the keywords that have been used to create the bookmarks, notes or folders you have shared: they will be available on the auto-complete suggestions that the search text field offers all public users.

You may want to keep in mind that once an item (bookmark, note or folder) has been made public, we cannot stop third party entities from copying it or indexing it. Even after you decide to no longer make that item public, a copy of the item may remain on the Internet and be available for consultation in search engine indexes. This is outside of our control and we cannot be held accountable for such copies or how they are used.

The thing to remember is that: if your data is marked as private, which is the default setting in www.linqto.me, that data will only be available to you, delivered securely to your device. We will not access the data or share it with anyone in any circumstances!

We have been quiet on the Linqto.me blog throughout all of 2017, but busy working in the background. The website interface has been streamlined to allow it to seamlessly adapt to three very different types of displays: computer (desktop and laptop) displays, tables and mobile phones.

Having access to your bookmarks from anywhere and on any device is a necessity today. In the past www.linqto.me already allowed you to have access to your favorite bookmarks and notes from anywhere, the issues was the device you were using. As long as you were using a desktop or laptop you could easily work with the site. Some bigger screen tablets would work well, but mobile phone screens proved to be a challenge, since the site rendered too small on these devices and the controls to allow you to create / edit or simply inspect content you had created where inaccessible to touch.

During all of 2017, we have worked to get the site to correctly render on all these three formats: the large size display of a computer, the medium display of a tablet and the smaller size of a phone. This included changing the way that certain controls and menus would render on the larger screens, medium tablets and small smartphone screens. We have added self-explanatory icons for menus, made sure buttons and menus were rendering big enough to allow them to be used with touch screens, as they should be.

Starting with www.linqto.me version 8, you can now quickly access all your stored bookmarks on any device with ease. Just give it a try and see what our new mobile layout looks like, and www.linqto.me will also be your new bookmark and notes manager on the phone and tablet.

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In part one of this article we looked at how you can install and use the Linqto Bookmarklet to easily add bookmarks directly from the pages you are browsing to your www.linqto.me account. If you are using the Internet Explorer browser, you may also use the Accelerator feature to bookmark pages as you browse.

Start by going to the Tools page of you www.linqto.me account. Here you will find a section describing the Internet Explorer accelerator. You may also install the accelerator via the link present on the home website of www.linqto.me if you are using Internet Explorer:

Just click the IE Accelerator button or the IE Accelerator link on the home page to install the accelerator in your browser. You will be prompted with the following window:

Make sure to check the 'Make this my default provider for this Accelerator category' checkbox to make this accelerator the default one in the tools category, and have it be displayed directly in the context menu for accelerators.

Once the accelerator is installed, you can just right click any part of a page you are navigating on, and you will immediately see the context menu displayed by Internet Explorer.

Select the Linqto.me Accelerator menu item, and this will open a new window where the url of the page you are browsing and the title will be automatically captured. You may also provide other details such as a description or keywords to help you when searching for the bookmark later. You may also directly save the bookmark and allow www.linqto.me to generate the rest of the data on the bookmark by examining the page.

Tip:

If you select a piece of text from the page you currently accessing, and then right click and access the Linqto.me Accelerator as described above, the selected text from the page will be captured in the bookmark description field. This will allow you to provide information on the bookmark to be saved even faster.

Like with the bookmarklet, remember to also tick the 'Remember me' check box when logging on to www.linqto.me before attempting to use the accelarator, as this will allow the system to authenticate you when you attempt bookmark a page.

Happy bookmarking in the Cloud.

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Having favorites in the Cloud with www.linqto.me is useful, and can help you organize and maintain your collection of bookmarks as well as access them easier as you can read here. But you also need a way to easily add bookmarks while you are navigating around the web at the click of the button, without moving away from the page you are on.

Enter the bookmarking tools that www.linqto.me has developed for just this purpose: an easy to use JavaScript bookmarklet to be used with any browser and an accelerator to be used with Internet Explorer 9 and above. In this article we will look at how to make good use of both of these tools to easily save new bookmarks into the cloud.

The Linqto.me Bookmarklet.

After creating your account with www.linqto.me, head over to the Tools page of your private space on the site. On this page you will be able to find the Bookmarklet tool – this is a piece of automation that you can add to your browser that will allow you to save bookmarks directly from the page you are on without having to open www.linqto.me in another tab.

Locate the 'Bookmarklet' button and drag and drop the button to the favorites bar of your browser as shown in the screenshot below.

You will need to display the favorites bar of your browser before you attempt to drag the button over. This can be done in the following ways:

• In Internet Explorer, go to the View menu, select 'Explorer Bars' menu item, and the 'Favorites' to display the favorites bar.
• In Google Chrome, click on the Settings button (on the right hand side of the address bar) and then click on the 'Favorites' menu item, and then 'Show Favorites Bar'
• Here is an article on how to display this bar in Firefox: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/bookmarks-toolbar-display-favorite-websites
• In Opera go into the Settings menu, then select 'Toolbars' menu icon and then the 'Bookmarks Bar' to show the favorites bar which is hidden by default.

Once you drag and drop the bookmarklet on the favorites bar of your browser it will look something link the following:

When navigating around the web, if you decide to save a page to the favorites collection you have with www.linqto.me, just press the Linqto Bookmarklet button on your browser. It will open a new window with the url of the page you wish to save already populated. You may choose to add more information on the bookmark, such as keywords or a description, or just press the 'Save' button directly and let the system generate the information from the page directly. And you have saved your bookmark into the Cloud.

Remember to also tick the 'Remember me' check box when logging on to www.linqto.me before attempting to use the bookmarklet, as this will allow the system to authenticate you when you attempt bookmark a page.

Continue reading part 2 to see how to use the 'Internet Explorer Accelerator'.

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If you want to start using www.linqto.me to manage your bookmarks online, you might want to transfer your already existing browser bookmarks into the Cloud to continue using them and add more as you go along. The process to import existing favorites from a browser into Linqto.me is a simple three stage process and can be done in just a few clicks.

Package your bookmarks into an HTML file and upload

All modern browsers have the capacity to save the favorites you have stored in them in HTML file format. Click on the icons below to see how this can be achieved by the main browsers on the market:

Once you have this HTML file generated with your favorites, head over to www.linqto.me and, in the My Bookmarks section, click on the 'Import Bookmarks' button as shown below:

The system will allow you to upload the HTML file generated by your browser and will then indicate how many favorites were contained inside the file once it has examined in.

Sit back and let www.linqto.me do the work of inspecting the favorites

While a favorite bookmark in a browser only has a title and the URL of the site it is pointing to, in www.linqto.me a bookmark allows you to have more information added to it. Notably, a bookmark allows you to add keywords to it so that you may search for it in the system afterwards. It also allows you to have a description text, where you can take notes about the page the bookmark is pointing to, for example. Bookmarks also allow for a thumbnail image to be associated with them – this image is retrieved from the page the bookmark is pointing to.

During this stage, www.linqto.me will go through the list of bookmarks you are trying to import, and will scan each one. It will attempt to connect to the site the bookmark is pointing to in order to generate a description, extract keywords and associate a thumbnail. This process does require some work (on behalf of the system) but a progress bar will inform you of how many bookmarks have been scanned and how many are still remaining.

Please do not navigate away from this page while the scanning process is in progress, as this will stop the import procedure.

Inspect the bookmark meta-data and complete the import

Once the system has finished scanning each of the bookmarks you wish to import into the Cloud, it will present you with a list of bookmarks with keywords, description and thumbnails already filled in. You can click on the magnifier lens in front of each of the bookmarks to go in and see the details for a given one. When you are on the bookmarks details view can also modify the information the system has generated for a given favorite if you wish.

However, please note that at this stage the bookmarks are not yet saved into the system, so if you decide to go and inspect / modify a given favorite / favorites, you need to come back to the list of favorites to be imported, by clicking on the 'Return to list' button:

Once you are back on the list of inspected favorites, you can the press the 'Import All' button to save all the favorites that have been extracted from the HTML file you have provided into www.linqto.me. If you have made any changes to the way the system has generated description, keywords or thumbnails for a favorite or favorites, these changes will also be saved into the system. When the save is completed, you will be taken to your 'Bookmarks' page where you will be able to see all the favorites you have imported.

You might then want to look into sorting these favorite bookmarks using folders, as explained in this article. You can also configure you Start Page on www.linqto.me as explained here.

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With the introduction of version 7.0 of www.linqto.me the system offers you a new dashboard to quickly view the bookmarks you have created / imported into the cloud. Once you get to the authenticated user landing page (here) you will see a new icon is available to take you to the bookmarks Dashboard.

The bookmark dashboard is also available via the following URL, if you have already logged into the system: www.linqto.me/my

The dashboard offers you different views for the bookmarks you have associated with your account in www.linqto.me . The view displayed in the dashboard is configurable to show bookmarks in different ways. To configure the view displayed in the dashboard, you can click the 'Configure' button which can be found at the top of the Dashboard on the right hand side of the page:

In the configuration page of the Dashboard, you have the choice between different views to display bookmarks that you have created with your account:

1. Recently Visited View

If you visit one of the bookmarks you have created on www.linqto.me in your browser and you are already logged into the system, the system will remember that you have visited that bookmark. If you chose the recently visited view in the dashboard configuration, the dashboard will display a list of all the bookmarks you have visited (while logged on). The list will be sorted from starting from the most recently visited bookmark.

If you wish to use this view, we recommend that you chose to always authenticated when visiting www.linqto.me – to do this, check the 'Remember Me' checkbox the next time you log into the system from your browser. By doing so, the system will remember you for two months on the computer where you checked this option

1. Recently Created View

This is another rendering of the classic view that you have of all of the bookmarks that you have in www.linqto.me, sorted in inverse order of their creation - the bookmark you have created last (or modified last) will be the first to be displayed in this view.

In this view, you can also choose to configure the sorting criteria further. You can choose to sort the bookmarks you have with your account either by name, creation date, last update or number of views. You can opt for ascending or descending order of the sort to be displayed in the dashboard.

1. From Folder View

In this view, the Dashboard will display all bookmarks coming from a folder you have already created with www.linqto.me. For more information on how to manage folders in the system you can refer to a previous article in this blog, article you can find here.

You can also configure the new Dashboard to be the default landing page when you visit www.linqto.me and you are already logged in. If you wish to see how to configure this, you can read the following article. By making the dashboard your landing page you can immediately access the bookmarks view that suits you best.

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2016 is here and we have updated www.linqto.me to give you even more functionality when managing your favorites and notes directly in the cloud. With version 7.0 of www.linqto.me, you can choose the landing page (home page) that you will be redirected to once you authenticate onto the platform.

Up to version 7.0 of www.linqto.me, if you authenticated with your user account onto the system, you were redirected to the authenticated users landing page. This page that gave you summary of how many bookmarks, notes, folders, … had created in the system under your account.

Moreover, if you had opted for a persistent authentication, by clicking the 'Remember me' checkbox during the login process, on your next visit to www.linqto.me as an authenticated user, you would have come in on the public home page. From this page you could have reached the 'authenticated user landing page' by clicking on the 'My Content' button.

With version 7.0 of the system, we have introduced the notion of a configurable home page, which will be the same each time you logon to www.linqto.me or come back to the system having already been authenticated. From the authenticated users landing page, you will see a new icon is available – for the Dashboard – as well as a button to configure the dashboard, underneath the Dashboard description:

You can also reach this configuration page by clicking on the 'My Profile' button on any of the pages once you have logged in, then clicking on the 'Configure Dashboard' () button.

On the lower half of the configuration page, you will see information on the settings for the system home (landing) page, which you will be routed to once you have logged in, or if you come back to www.linqto.me from another site and you are already logged in.

You have the choice between three distinct options:

Nothing: this was the default behavior of the system before version 7 of www.linqto.me. Once you logged into the system, you were taken to the authenticated user landing page, page which would give you a summary of all bookmarks, notes, folders, … that you had created in the cloud. If you were coming back to www.linqto.me from another site, and you were already logged into the system, you would get to the public home page of www.linqto.me.

User Home: if you choose this option, the system will take you to the authenticated user landing page, which shows you the summary of all items that you have created with www.linqto.me each time you log into the system (which was the case before as well). It will also redirect you to this same page if you are returning to www.linqto.me from another site and you have already logged into the system – this would be equivalent to arriving on the public home page and then clicking the 'My Content' button.

Dashboard: will take you to the dashboard of www.linqto.me, page that will show a collection of all the bookmarks you have recently visited or created. As with the option of the 'User Home', when you log into the system, you will be taken directly to the Dashboard. If you are returning to www.linqto.me from another website, and you are already logged in, you will also be taken to the Dashboard without the need for any other clicks on your side.

We hope this feature allows you to access your bookmarks faster and speeds up your usage of www.linqto.me.