Open Yahoo! Bookmarks in a Sidebar

Open Yahoo! Bookmarks in a Sidebar

The easiest way to take your Yahoo! Bookmarks out for a surfing binge is by tacking them up in a browser sidebar.

Once you've invested the time and energy into building your Yahoo! Bookmarks collection, you'll be ready to take them for a spin. Of course, you can view them in My Yahoo!, where they're meant to be displayed, but it's also useful to bring them up in a browser sidebar for quick surfing. This saves you the trouble of opening the sites in a new window and losing your place, and it lets you focus on seeing what's new at your favorite sites.

One problem with this plan is that you can't isolate your Yahoo! Bookmarks to their own page. They're fully integrated with the My Yahoo! page. Fortunately, Jason B. Silverstein at Yahoo! pointed out a little-known page that does isolate your Yahoo! Bookmarks into their own space: http://my.yahoo.com/tearoff/sites.html. This page is used to display bookmarks inside Yahoo! Messenger, but there's no reason you can't use it to build your own sidebar.

To use the sidebar, you'll need to be logged in at My Yahoo!. But once that's taken care of, your new isolated Yahoo! Bookmarks will be ready to go.

A Firefox Sidebar

The Firefox browser makes quick work of opening web pages in a sidebar. Simply navigate to the Yahoo! Bookmarks URL and choose Bookmarks Bookmark This Page… from the Firefox menu (or Ctrl-D if you're a fan of keyboard shortcuts). Then give the bookmark a descriptive name, such as Y!Bookmarks Sidebar.

Now find your newly added bookmark, right-click, and choose Properties to bring up the bookmark's properties, as shown in Figure.

Bookmark properties dialog

Check the "Load this bookmark in the sidebar" option, and you'll be set. Whenever you click the bookmark in the future, your Yahoo! Bookmarks will open in a sidebar. From there, you can click down the list, and the sidebar will stay put while your bookmark opens in the main window (see Figure).

An Internet Explorer Sidebar

Setting up a custom Internet Explorer sidebar isn't quite as easy, but it is possible to customize the built-in search bar. Internet Explorer's search bar is a window that opens in a sidebar. You can activate the search bar by clicking the Search button in your main toolbar, as shown in Figure.

Yahoo! Bookmarks in a Firefox sidebar

Internet Explorer's Search button

This brings up one of several search forms from some of the big search engines on the Web, including Yahoo!. However, you can put your isolated Yahoo! Bookmarks in this window by changing some values in the Windows Registry.

The Windows Registry is a database that stores important application information. Be aware that hand-editing the Windows Registry could cause serious problems that would require you to reinstall Windows.

The code.

To keep things simple, you can edit the relevant Windows Registry settings with a .reg file. Create a new file on your desktop called Y!Bookmarks.reg and add the following text:

	REGEDIT4

	[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main]
	"Use Search Asst"="no"
	"Search Bar"="http://my.yahoo.com/tearoff/sites.html"

Running the hack.

Save the file, double-click it, confirm the changes, and you're all set. This file will disable the default search pane and instead load your Yahoo! Bookmarks. You'll need to restart Internet Explorer if it's running. After that, clicking the Search button from now on will give you something similar to the page shown in Figure.

Yahoo! Bookmarks in the IE search bar

Hacking the hack.

If you'd ever like to go back to the default search behavior, it's just another .reg file. You could call this one search_restore.reg and add the following text:

	REGEDIT4

	[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main]
	"Use Search Asst"="yes"
	"Search Page"="http://home.microsoft.com/access/allinone.asp"
	"Search Bar"="http://home.microsoft.com/search/lobby/search.asp"

Save the file, double-click it, and Internet Explorer should go back to the way it was.