20 Ways You Can Use Web Page Links On A Mac

There are many ways to store and recall Web locations other than just plain browser bookmarks. Learn how to create lists and documents, add to contacts and events, even make Menu Bar and keyboard shortcuts.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's look at many different ways that you can save the links to websites. 
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Now usually when you think about saving a website you think about saving a bookmark. But there are so many different ways to actually save links. Some of them have uses in all sorts of odd situations. So, like I said, the most obvious way is Bookmarks. You're in Safari or a browser of your choice. You go to Bookmarks and you can Add Bookmark or Command D. There are other ways to do it as well. You can add a bookmark into a folder in Bookmark's Folder just at the main level and then access it later on just by going to Bookmarks and there it is. 
But if you were to save your bookmark to your Favorites Folder then it will appear in Favorites which is available in a few different places. Most notably if you go to Show Favorites Bar you'll see it up here. You can have folders of things and you could have bookmarks right there. A lot handier than going into this. But also you could go to the Start page. The Start page, of course, is heavily customizable. In it you can have Favorites there as well including any bookmarks that you have. Storing a link in Bookmarks is useful. Storing it in Favorites inside of Bookmarks is useful in other ways. 
Now in Safari you also have Reading List. You can go to Bookmarks and Add to Reading List in here and it will appear in your Reading List Sidebar. So you can store all sorts of things in here and when you actually view them they get marked as Read. You can scroll down here and you could see All or just Unread things in your Reading List. You can Search it as well. 
Now you can also save a link as a file. So just go to the Address Bar here at the top of Safari. Grab the web address. You have to grab right here where the address actually is. Some of these other elements do other things. So grab it here and you can drag. If you drop it somewhere in the Finder, like a folder or the Desktop, you get a web location file which is just a link. Now if you ever want to view that page just double click that file. Open it up like it's a document or application and it will open up in your web browser. 
So you can store a bunch of these in Folders. Here I am in the Finder. I'm going to create a folder called Links. I can move this into here and see those files there. I can create subfolders in here and organize these anyway I want. You can go in and rename these to anything. It doesn't matter what the name is, it will still link to the same place. 
If you have a bunch of these on your Desktop you can organize them here if you want. But if you turn On Use Stacks then you get the Desktop Stacks here which means all of your links will be grouped together as well as groups of other types of files, like Documents and such. Now I can click here and it expands just by web links. But if I have them in a folder here in the Finder I could drag that folder to the right side of the Dock, add it there, and now it's a Dock Stack. I can view it like that. I could also Control Click on it and change it to a List and then I can view the individual items and even any sub-folders that are in here as well. So you can have access to a whole set of bookmarks that really are these little web location files and they are in your Dock rather than in your browser. 
Now it's a little strange but you can also place these web links in your Finder Toolbar. The way to do that is to open up a second window. So you're got two windows like this. In this window I'm going to Control Click up here and Customize Toolbar. So now I could drag these buttons into the Toolbar. But I could also drag other items, like one of these links from the other window there since you can't get to them behind the customized thing. Then you've got the link there in the Toolbar. So now you've got your web location link here. Click on it and it will open up with your web browser and go to that site. 
I told you some of these rules are strange and this on has questionable use. I'm not sure why you would do it. 
What will make a lot more sense is to store links in a note. So you can create a note and you could drag and drop links right here to a note. If you don't want it to be this big block here you could Control Click on it and View as Small Images. Then you get a smaller link like that. But you could also select the link and Copy and then go and Paste and it will just be there as a regular link and now the next time you do something, like Space or Return, you'll actually just put a normal link like that which makes a lot more sense. You can include a more compact list of links. You could organize them as Lists with headings and sublists and all of that. Create a nice document here in Notes where you could easily access different links plus the note you can also export as a PDF. So if you create something really nice and you want to save it outside of Notes it's easy to do that.
Reminders is another place you can create a list of links. Reminders isn't just for things that are reminders. You also could use them for lists. I create tons of lists that has nothing to do with a particular time. You could do something like, web links like that and then you could drag and drop a link directly from Safari like that and just keep creating this list. You can, of course, also type in the names or Copy and Paste into a New Reminder like that. You can see it's clickable but takes up less space. 
Another useful location for links is inside your Contacts App. So many people have websites or the company they work for has a website or maybe you want to link to their social media profiles. You can add, under Fields here, under More Fields, a URL and you could put anything that you want. It's called a Home Page but, I mean, it could be a link to any site, Facebook profile, or whatever it is that you want. Now that is a clickable link. You can add more of those. So you can actually add all the social media profiles and different web links for a person in their Contacts Record. That way you could go right to them. See their phone number and also know where you can go to online to see what they are up to. 
Calendar also lets you add links. So if you have an event or something like this you can add URL's right here. You paste it in and you could see it's clickable. So you can now go when this event comes up or when you're getting ready for it you can go in and you can click on that link and it takes you to that page. You can add as many links as you want here in this section of an event. I find this is particularly useful in event planning because you could put links to hotels and locations and things like that right here in the event itself. So you don't have to go and find those links in your bookmarks or some other place. It's right there with your event in the Calendar. 
Of course you can also just create documents that hold links. So the simplest one might be to do a TextEdit document. You'll want to make sure that you're doing Rich Text here so it can hold the link. You can Copy and Paste a link in here and you could see it turns into a link automatically. But make sure that under Edit, Substitutions, you have Smart Links turned on else it won't turn into a link that you can click. You could also, of course, drag and drop links in here and then the link will actually take the Title of the page. But the link itself is the same and will go to the same place. 
Of course you can also use Pages for this. You can paste links in and you see it turns into a link. You can also drag and drop links in here. When you select a link like this you go to Format, you could Edit link. You could change the display text to something else different than the link. So if you're writing any kind of document and want to include a list of links you could certainly do that in Pages and style it up anyway that you want. 
Now if you're interested in maintaining a list then doing it as a spreadsheet would be a good idea. you could drag and drop links or Copy and Paste them in Numbers and then you could really do a lot with the table here. So you could have the links, and they are clickable links here. You could leave these as links and maybe put the actual name of the site over here. You could maybe put notes and other information in other columns. Then you could shrink this table down. Format it like you want. The cool thing about doing it in Numbers is it is easy to Sort. You can sort by like the date you added them or the title or some rating system that you give them. There's all sorts of different things you could do for keeping track of data like a list of links in a Numbers spreadsheet. 
So if you could use Pages and Numbers to store links for different reasons, how about Keynote. Is there any reason to actually store links in Keynotes? Well, it could be a really handy way to have a graphical interface to different websites. You can create textbooks or shapes and in them you could put whatever text that you want. This could include things that are formatted as a link. So if you want to create a more freeform document that shows a bunch of different links you can certainly do so here in Pages. Something like this, for instance, where a kid or somebody who isn't very good at computers could actually just click on the links that they want and it opens up their web browser. Of course when you're done making this in Keynote you can simply export it to a PDF and then they double click to open up the PDF document and then all these links would be active and take them to webpages. You can even add other buttons in here that then link to another page. So you can go and put a slide and say Slide #2 and now this links to slide number 2 and maybe there's a link from slide number 2 back to slide number 1. That all works in a PDF so they can have a multipage kind of navigation system to get around and find the links that they want. 
I could image, for instance, a teacher using this to actually provide some links for an assignment in a class. Create a nice PDF that goes to different websites that they can use to find the information the student needs. 
So all of the thing I just showed you could be used to create PDF's. As a matter of fact you may want to do that if you're creating something in Pages, if you are finished with a spreadsheet in Numbers, or something in Keynote you can go export that out as a PDF so that you don't need to actually open up the document itself in the app that you created with to access the links. You can just access them in Preview or you can give it to somebody and they could access with whatever PDF reader that they want. 
Now wouldn't it be nice to access websites here in the Menu Bar. Well, there's no real easy way to do that but there kind of is. We now how this Shortcuts Menu up here. So, of we go to the Shortcuts App and create a simple shortcut here that opens an URL. So we'll just use Open URL's here. I'll put in an URL and we'll just call it the same thing as the site. Then under Setup here I'll say Pin in Menu Bar. Now I can go here whenever I want, click there, the first time it is going to ask for permission. But not after that. Now I have a quick way to get to a web site from my Menu Bar. So add a few in here that you like. But you could also set this up with a keyboard shortcut like that. So I'll set this with the Keyboard Shortcut F17, like that. So now I can press that shortcut key and it will actually trigger the shortcut and open up the website. So you can now assign a keyboard shortcut to a link if you have a site that is that important that you need to get to it with one press. 
One last thing I want to show you. Remember when we had these little web location files and they have this horrible icon here. Why don't they have just the icon for the website.  Well hopefully at some point in the future Apple will add that as a function of these web location files. But until then let me show you how to do it manually.
I'm going to go to this address. But after the equals sign you type the name of the site. That will give you the icon for that site. Control Click on it and Copy Image. Then select the file. Do Command i for info and select the icon there and do Command V to Paste. Now you've got a web link that you could use in a variety of different ways that I showed you but the icon makes sense. 
There are probably even more places and different things that you could do with web links. These are just some ideas. If you have some other ways of using web links that I didn't mention put them in the Comments below. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 9 Responses to “20 Ways You Can Use Web Page Links On A Mac”

Robert

3 years ago

Only one question: how do we copy a URL and paste it without the "https://www." text? Saving URLs to Contacts and Calendar for years and it looks cleaner without the https.Thank You

Gary Rosenzweig

Robert: No easy way to do that. Funny, as I consider it the opposite. When I see a URL without https:// I think it looks wrong and usually add it. You could just manually edit, of course. You could also build something in Shortcuts to remove the https:// and also the www. from the text in the clipboard. Not sure if you have used Shortcuts though or what your experience is there. It may not be worth the time to learn and construct something.

Dot

What was the complete URL at Google to display the favicon? I can see everything up to "&domain_url=". Do you just add on the URL of the domain whose favicon you're seeking? Thank you for all these interesting lessons! I'm a Patron.

Don't need to answer! I tried adding the URL, including the "https://" and it worked! What fun! Thanks.

Jasper

I often need to share project files with Windows users who can't open my .webloc files—Is there a convenient way to generate files that will work on Windows and macOS?

Jasper: If you need to share URLs with a Windows user, or anyone really, just give them the URL. Create a text document or anything and list URLs in there. Keep it simple.

Stephen

Obviously there's adding a hyperlink to a word or words in Pages (select word, right click, Add Link), so that clicking on the word takes you to the webpage. Much neater than including the web address as the link.

Liam

2 years ago

Hi Gary, So I'm trying the trick at the end of the video to get the logo. But all of the sites I have been to do not have the = sign, I tried adding it and that did not work. What I'm I doing wrong?

Thank you much,
Liam

Liam: Use that URL and after the equal sign put the website. So you type (or paste) this:
https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?sz=64&domain_url=macmost.com
to get the icon for MacMost. For another site replace macmost.com with the domain for that site.

Comments Closed.

20 Ways You Can Use Web Page Links On A Mac

Comments: 9 Responses to “20 Ways You Can Use Web Page Links On A Mac”

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