Earlier on Monday I pushed out a new feature that I’ve been working over last week — Add to Folders. For 2 days only 12 folders have been created on the system, 4 of them are actually testing/demo folders created by the moderators (despite attempts to promote it on Facebook and on Google+). So let’s see when a blog post + hopefully some colour pictures here would help.

The usefulness of Bookmarks has been historically undervalued. It helps to expand the ever so limited human memory and has rescued many who suffered from occasional forgetfulness. It guards the treasures for its owner to go back to. It comes in various forms and shapes — I usually just use my business card because no one seems to be interested in them. On the web browsers it usually fashions in the shape of glowing star. And now OzBargain also comes with its own bookmarks for you to keep track the bargains, although we gave it a pretty pragmatic name — Add to Folders.

The problem we are trying to solve here is simple. OzBargain has lots of bargains posted every single day, and often people want to keep track the deals they are interested in — not necessarily something they want to give +1 to, but just want to organise them into folders so they can do research on them later. Well, you can always use your browser’s bookmarks/favourites — but let me show you how an integrated solution from inside OzBargain can do much more.

First of all, how do I add a deal into my bookmark folder? Here is a step by step instruction.

You start from the deal page. For example, you ran out of hard drive space (again), and you are looking for some large external drives. You came across this Seagate Expansion deal from Amazon and you wish to bookmark it for comparison later.

Assume that you have logged into OzBargain, you shall see the option Add to Folder stuck in between “Add Reminder” and “Hide from Listing” (both neat features which hopefully we’ll introduce later).

Click on “Add to Folders” to bring up the menu. You’ll see that each account has one default bookmark folder named “Bookmark”. If you wish to file the current deal there, you can just click on the checkbox next to it.

However we are in the process of doing some research on cheap external hard drives. We want to create a new folder — call it “Big drives for research” for example. You’ll need to hit the “Create New Folder” link in the menu, which would let you fill in the name for the new folder. Click on “Create” button when you have finished. You have now filed this deal into your shining new folder!

Note that each deal can be filed into multiple folders, and each folder can store multiple deals (no upper limit currently). You then go around trying to find all other big drives and bookmark them…

To access your folders, it would be a Tab inside your account profile page. Alternatively, you can quickly access your list of folders from the “My Account” dropdown menu.

There you have it! A list of multi-terabyte external hard drives ready to be assessed!

There are other things you can do with your bookmark folders. For example

• You wish to share your folder with your friends who do not have an OzBargain account or share it on Facebook. All the folders are created as Private, i.e. only the owner of the folder can see the list. If you wish to share with those outside of OzBargain, you will need to click on Preference to change the settings for your folder.

  Change Sharing to “Public” would let anyone to access your folder — feel free to pass on the URL to your friends!

• You also like to sort it in the reverse order of votes (from highest to lowest) to help you decide which deal is the best. Change Sorting to “Votes”, and then click on “Save” to update your folder’s settings.

  

• You then realise that one of the deals you’ve bookmarked has since expired. There is no point to keep expired deals in your “To Buy” folders, is there? You can remove all expired deals from your folder by clicking on “Preference”, “Operations” tab and then “Clear Expired” button.

  Gone! Now only the deals that are still active remain.

There are many uses for “Add to Folders” just like there are many reasons you leave a bookmark in a book. For example, I am keeping a bookmark of something that I bought (shared with other OzBargain users only). Or a wish list/crave list? Or you are trying to compile your very own pizza coupon list?

Feel free to share with us what you use the new bookmark folders for, and give us some feedback on where we can improve.