Importing favorites in IE, and keeping them in order
Another migration story here from Jen's recent computer upgrade.
Internet Explorer has this handy dandy built in export/import feature for favorites and cookies right? Well, yes, but only if you understand that when you import a list of favorites Windows automatically reorders them into alphabetical order.
So for example if your favorites looked like this:
Bob's house of IP
Play-doh fansite
Alfred's cool site
Cheese dot com, all cheese all the time
It would now look like this:
Alfred's cool site
Bob's house of IP
Cheese dot com, all cheese all the time
Play-doh fansite
Doesn't seem like such an issue, unless you have like 200 freakin' links, and then it's just exasperating to reorder them. Exporting a bookmark.htm file from IE, or even copying over the Favorites folder just simply doesn't keep the order.
The reason? Because XP keeps the order of your bookmarks in the registry. How fucking stupid is that? To be specific:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\MenuOrÂder\Favorites
If you export that and save as a file called order.reg, and then merge it on the new computer (after you've alredy imported the new links and shut down IE) then when you restart IE they'll be in the order they were originally.