On sign-up, you are asked to choose a question and answer. This is used in case you forget your password. If that ever happens:

1. Bookmarkchamp will show you the question you typed in
2. You will need to provide the answer excactly as you typed it in (except for differences in capitals and lowercase letters)

Choose a personal question others cannot guess, but you will still remember! For example,

Security Question: What was the name of my first pet?
Answer: Merlin

To change your Security Question and Answer, click here.

To recover a lost password, click here.

To change your password, click here.

The best thing you can do with Bookmarkchamp is put it in your sidebar. Then you can use drag and drop, see when your Favourites are updated straight away, and have access to all your bookmarks all the time.

An explanation on how to do this is available here.

To edit or delete any bookmark, click on the bookmark and hold the mouse button down for a few moments. This will load the bookmark for editing.

You will know you have clicked long enough when the background of the bookmark turns yellow (again). This means the bookmark is being loaded.

Once the bookmark is loaded into the main form, make any changes and click on "Update" or remove it with the "Delete" button. Couldn't be simpler.

Different browsers allow you to drag and drop links from different places. The best way to discover how this works is to experiment yourself.

For example, Firefox and Opera allow you to drag and drop links directly from a web page or the address bar.

Your bookmarks are shown in the order they were last added (the most recently-added bookmarks first). This order cannot be changed.

Sorry, not for now.

Once you start using Bookmarkchamp, you will notice two links appear below your bookmarks.

Share (the first link) points to a public site where you and others can see your bookmarks without logging in. This is also the only place you can see your bookmarks after they have been archived. This happens when you have more than around 50 regular bookmarks; Favourites are never archived.

News Feed (the second link) points to a public RSS feed of your links.

When you add or update a bookmark you have the option of ticking the Favourite checkbox. When you select this option two things happen to the bookmark:

• It will appear in the Favourites group, above the list of regular bookmarks
• It will be checked for updates, and whenever a change is detected, the bookmark will be shown in orange (Favourites that are checked for updates are shown in bold type)

The idea is for your favourite sites to be visible always, so you have quick access to them, and so you can see when they are updated straight away.

Bookmarkchamp sorts Favourites in alphabetical order and this cannot be changed.

As a workaround, you can group your Favourites by using common prefixes to name them. For example, group your news sites like this:

• News: New York Times
• News: BBC
• News: SBS World News

When Bookmarkchamp works out how one of your Favourite bookmarks is updated, it will show the bookmark in bold.

From then on, it will check every so often to see if the site has been updated since your last visit. And if it has changed, it will change the link to orange.

Bookmarkchamp works out your last visit based on when you last clicked on the link within Bookmarkchamp. If you visit a link some other way, Bookmarkchamp will not know about this and it can tell you about an update you have already seen.

Bookmarkchamp uses RSS and Atom news feeds to work out when a website is updated. It looks for a specific piece of code in the bookmarked page to find the feed, as described here:

http://www.rssboard.org/rss-autodiscovery

Bookmarkchamp will use the first supported <link rel="alternate"> tag it finds.

Labels work the same as Tags do in other applications: they help you sort your Bookmarks.

Click with the CTRL key to select or de-select multiple Labels. (On a Mac, use the CMD key).

Bookmarkchamp is a combined bookmark manager and news feed reader (or aggregator).

It allows you to store and access your bookmarks from any computer connected to the Internet: at home, at work, on the road...

It is a web application that requires no installation.

It even works in the sidebar of browsers that support this feature. This keeps your bookmarks right next to your main browser window: always visible but out of your way (no more logging in every now and then or switching windows every time you want to use your online bookmarks).

A long time before del.icio.us or any other bookmarking sites, my friend Peter had the idea of an online app with a big focus on bookmarking. It was meant to keep your bookmarks and your mail and other personal stuff in sync across computers. It was a great idea at the time, but we didn't do anything about it. It suffered the same fate as our shrink-wrap travelling salesman algorithm, and most of the ideas we came up with back and forth on the train to school :)

Although the original idea was more than just a bookmarking application, the bookmarking bit stayed in the back of my mind because it was a dead obvious thing and for a while nobody did anything about it.

By 2003 the idea would have been done with except for a chance task at work (thanks Mabel!) to program a news feed for the Netscape sidebar. Netscape had a feature where you could add different sites to the sidebar of the browser. People would write tiny web pages that fit into the sidebar, things like news tickers. Until then I had always thought that it never made much sense to have a bookmarking app except as a browser plug-in, and only dodgy corporations mucked around with hacking their own buttons and such into your browser. That was evil, but worst of all, it was probably quite messy. The sidebar thing gave me a good excuse to do something that all the bookmarking apps had missed.

And that was it. At some point I got to work; I was fully aware that there were some very good and very popular bookmarking sites and plug-ins around but I had a quick look at them and decided they didn't do it for me. News aggregators didn't do it for me either. I wanted to build something that did do it for me. I wanted to bring back the original dead-obvious-idea spirit. I wanted to build a bookmarking application for (power) users that basically,

• could be used without switching windows or logging in every now and then,
• without having to install anything,
• it would do your what browser's bookmark features did and then some,
• it would be tiny, neat, quick and sweet,
• it would be fun to use and make you smile, then it would get to work and out of your way

Thanks my friends who were the first to test Bookmarkchamp (thanks Peter, Jorge, Martín, Ana and Boris). This is nothing more than a bookmarking app and a news feed reader, it certainly isn't my day job, but I hope you get a kick out of it because that's the idea. Cheers.