We all have this problem. The internet is really big. If you’re like me you have a lot of interests, and you find something new DAILY.

The bookmarks toolbar in your browser is only so big. I’ve got my top 20 or 30 links on my toolbar with the names turned off so that it’s just a row of icons, and that suits me pretty fine for my main links. But when I find a great article that I want to save for later, I always end up dumping it into the black hole called my Bookmarks.

There are many solutions to this problem out there - del.icio.us and other social bookmarking websites claim to help you organize and tag your bookmarks so you can find them later and share them - but I’ve never been able to get into the habit of using it. The bookmarks seem so unreacheable and the Firefox plugin they’ve made is clunky and hard to use - plus it takes up too much room.

Having my own website, the perfect solution for me would be to organize my bookmarks using categories and tags onto my own bookmarks page that I can access from anywhere. The best way to add bookmarks would be with a smart bookmarklet that can describe the bookmark using the title and meta tags from the page I’m bookmarking and add it to my Bookmarks page. Yeah.. it’s pretty much exactly what del.icio.us does, but somehow it feels easier and more personal.

Worried that I’d have to code this myself, I went searching for a Wordpress plugin to accomplish this, and to my surprise I found one that does exactly what I need… wpbookmarks. Unfortunately it’s been abandoned for a few years and does not work with Wordpress 2.1+

Luckily, with a little bit of work, I was able to upgrade the plugin to Wordpress 2.1+ with all of the original functionality. It works great and I’m already using it to save bookmarks. I plan to continue to update it, so I hope that the author does not mind that I’ve adopted his project. Eventually I would like to improve tagging support, make the bookmarks page searchable and better organized, implement a tag cloud and rating system, and support some sort of urgency that will indicate whether it’s a link I intend to revisit quickly or not.

You can download wpbookmarks 1.1 here. You can view the original project here.