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Most Usable Bookmark Managers?
stewartj asks: "I finally got sick of manually updating my large bookmarks collection between the computers I use at work and home. I've got a permanent connection at home and a personal webserver running, so I thought I'd install a bookmark manager. Searches on SourceForge and Freshmeat have brought up too many options to consider, so I thought I'd ask Slashdot readers if they have any recommendations for a good web-based bookmark manager? Is there a better solution to making my bookmarks available everywhere (but still keeping them secure)?"
Between several browsers on one computer (IE, Mozilla, etc), several computers at home, many computers at school or uni, and now computers at work, it simply fucking sucks.
I gave up years ago.
I don't bookmarks url's anymore. Its not worth the trouble.
I just use my memory.
Unless your dealing with lots of long complex url's (which i can then store in an email so i don't lose them) i just memorize everything.
Add bookmark my ass: what about the other 4 browsers on this computer, and 7 other computers i use regulary...
D.
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
I use phoenix. I put phoenix in a shared folder in windows. I export my bookmarks in html format to another share folder. This gives me my bookmarks everywhere, and here is how.
If I am out of the house and using windows
I access the share via typing \\mypc.mydomain.edu and then launch phoenix and import bookmarks.html
If I am out of the house and using *nix
I access my pc via ssh, launch phoenix using X-forwarding, sftp bookmarks.html over the line and import it.
If I am out of the house using a Mac
It hasn't happened yet, but if I buy one of those titanium thingies (which I would if I had my choice of portable computing) It would have OSX, which can SSH and X-Forward AFAIK.
Problem solved. Same browser everywhere same bookmarks.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
get an easy to remember yet reasonably obscure url, put your bookmarks there, and dont tell anyone that url, or link to the url from anywhere (so that google wont find it), or put the page in your robots.txt file.
yeah - it's security through obscurity - but it'll fly.
I had the same problem a while back and found nothing worth using, so I wrote one using PHP/MySQL in a few hours. It's your standard tree-like listing, where links are in folders. It's wonderful to have one central repository for all links.
It uses only two tables and has one PHP script to add edit/delete bookmarks.
It's also password protected, so you can keep sensitive info in there and not worry. Also, I made a "sidebar" mode for use in Mozilla.
Plans had included a SOAP interface for making XUL clients or something, but I didn't find a need.
If anyone is interested, especially in making it better, I could start a SourceForge project and get it out there. Let me know if there's any takers.
Note that these do not solve the problem of different formats. Nothing will fix this until some kind of RFC standard is made (probably based on XML). It would be nice, but it is not for real.
badness 10000
I would love to use a more robust References database to store my bookmarks. BibTeX is nice. It's not great for my purposes, but nice. Specifically, it does not handle URLs very well. Many of the bibtex style's don't understand the URL field (though I usually stick it in "howpublished"). In fact, there really needs to be a URI Entry (i.e. at the same level as Aricle, Book, etc). Maybe BibTeX is antiquated and a new and improved system for managing references to content is needed. (And this is what is really needed, don't think in the small domain of webpages, think bigger)
With that, my ideal system would also act as a cache (think google) and give me a way to reference specific parts of the webpage. Squid would probably be useful here. Think how often your bookmarked link gets removed from the webserver. Why not have your bookmark manager save a copy in a cache, for future use.
Also, when you are only interested in one part of a huge webpage, or wish to refer to a specific sentence, a mechanism for highlighting specific parts of a webpage would be great. I've seen some programs that work like this for changed material (that is, it highlights changes). This would be difficult to implement, but maybe a Mozilla plugin would be sufficient.
So, ideally, I want a references database that can cache websites, ftp downloads, etc, etc, then take that cached content and mark parts of it for specific referencing. When I view the database, I can go directly to the content, or go to the highlighted cache.
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More on topic, perhaps: I suggest you treat google as your bookmark manager. It really is easier this way, if your memory is good. For many things, you just think about what you are interested, type it in google and on the first page or two is the link you visited last week. Or maybe you need to remember something close to the title of the website. Google is your friend, it'll help you out if you aren't exact.
This doesn't work well for hard to find pages, for pages you don't access very often or if you have LOTS of links. But, hopefully there aren't many of those links that you need to store.
I use a combination of above. Projects (both those at work and at home) have BibTeX databases for long term access and documentation. Short term interests and those websites I access often are kept in my mind, though I have to google for them some times.
Give this a try. It's a free, advanced web-based bookmarking service. Lots of features.
I keep a bookmarks folder called To File. Every month or so I dump the whole thing to a Bookmarks page on my wiki.
It's easy to edit, as well as easily accessible.
As some have said, you could easily secure this with Apache, or your webserver of choice.
Some guy has been working on this for over a year. Haven't tried his patch, but you might want to take a look...
bug 124029
I believe there are other bugs/implementations in bugzilla, so you might want to hunt around.
yahoo has an online bookmark "manager" (for lack of a better term). Via my.yahoo.com (and a yahoo id) you can customize the the layout and content. Add the "my bookmarks" panel and then import (upload) your bookmarks to there. It supports netscape (and thus mozilla/phoenix), ie win32 and ie for macs.
I upload my bookmarks every so often manually, although I'm sure with some hacking one can make a script to automate the procedure (maybe someone already has). If you don't "yahoo", I'm sure there are other free online services that have an equivilent.
In Bob we trust.
Make an HTML document with all the bookmarks that you want to keep. You can organize this in an outline format so it's easy to navigate to the bookmark you want.
You can burn this onto a credit card sized CD and keep it with you all the time. You can also burn some images and stuff on it. The only problem is that you can't really update this easily.
You can also take this HTML document and copy it to a floppy disc. This way you can update it at any time.
I know that this doesn't solve the problem of having to reinput your bookmarks every time you reformat your computer or whatever, but it is an easy solution.
Welcome to the land of the free...pay toll ahead...no photography...please open your bag...
A couple of years ago, I found it to be easier just to look stuff up with google than to try and maintain a bookmark-list across accounts and OSs. Just try to remember as much specific stuff from the website as possible, whole centences work great. You'll be amazed at how well it works.
:)
(of course, when I say "does anyone still", I mean "I don't and everyone should be more like me"
If you download the Yahoo! Companion software, you can add a toolbar to your web browser (of course, it's Internet Exploder), but you can add bookmarks directly to it, and it carries over to any machine you have the companion installed on.
Too bad you're using Windows.
If you were using, say, Linux, you could just mount a NFS or SMB share and make your bookmarks file on the client a symlink to the one on the host.
May we never see th
It's even easier if you deploy it as a service. I recall there are HOW-TOs somewhere online... but I'm not motivated to google and I don't care about karma. :-P
Remember when Bookmarks were stored as HTML? And you could view them on any computer or share them on the internet easily, with absolutely zero conversion?
Wasnt that simple, sensible, and a generally good way to do things?
Why the fuck did everyone stop doing that?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I use SaveThis which is run by an offshoot of CNN (IIRC).
Not just Karma whoring, I'm downloading now. (:-{)}
Thanks for the heads-up PD.
Cheers,
Bill
bamph
Put up a CVS repository somewhere you have a shell, create a script that does things in this order:
;))
1: updates your bookmark file against the cvs
2: starts mozilla
3: commits any changes (to be run when mozilla exits, of course)
Of course this seems like overkill, but it'd work
(now i know what i'll be doing the rest of the afternoon.
BTW. This would have the added bonus of having the possibility to delete bookmarks you haven't used for a while without loosing them for ever...
If you've got a server online with MySQL and PHP, try Active PHP Bookmarks (google it, but I found it on Sourceforge).
It's a sinch to set up, the interface is nice and simple, it has a few extras that make it quite a nice little tool.
Ash nazg durbatuluk, ash nazg gimbatul Ash nazg thrakatuluk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul
Some sort of auto-categorizer, which compares the contents of your bookmarks to each other and automatically organizes bookmarks according to most frequent word or phrase or concept. User input would be by what factor to make the tree deep or shallow.
:( Teh suck.
I've searched for something like this but have only come up with a dissertation on the subject with a stone age non-available implementation for some old version of Unix. Naive Bayes is not really going to work unless you want to hand categorize many documents beforehand to train it on. I've also tried (ingeniously!) to use Google to determine the "category" of the link, and then reverse-mapping each bookmark into categories. This unfortunately won't work with links Google has not heard of and has no category for.
Finally I just gave up, and now I just keep my links in a searchable blog.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I've been using a wiki to accomplish this for a couple of years and have had no problems. Granted it is a couple of more steps than hitting the bookmark button, but it is great for ensuring access from anywhere. You can find wiki's built with most of the major languages, so one probably exists that would work on any system you have.
Sure it costs $6 a year, but I'd rather pay than use some free site that may or may not exist in the future. (Backflip was down for 2 weeks last November). I wanted something that I knew could sustain itself and I didn't like all the marketing with other free sites.
Flyrt has:
a Javascript flyrt tool that you put in your toolbar to easily bookmark sites
A Mozilla side bar
A pop-up window of your links for IE users
Easy import/export of bookmarks
Make folders public for others to use your links (http://flyrt.com/username)
There is a free 30 day trial. Check it out and of course constructive criticism is always appreciated.
At the FAQ page there is info on my philosophy and links to other web based bookmark managers, so you can try them all out.
What, me worry?
Definitely check out PowerMarks. It's shareware ($25) w/ a trial version, and needs windows, but they'll basically store your bookmarks on their server (no extra charge) & sync your bookmarks from each location.
The downside (and why I don't personally use it) is that any category information for a bookmark(what subfolder you used to keep it in) is lost. You search for a particular bookmark using keyword searches (kinda like Opera's bookmark-search).
Other options, without the sync functionality:
URLBase (shareware)
BKM
Does anyone have any experience with ACAP, the Application Configuration Access Protocol? It's somehow related to the Cyrus IMAP project, and claims to be able to store bookmarks, address book, etc. in a central location. Are there any ACAP clients?
Siggy Wiggy Figgy Tiggy a bana bo Biggy!
I use Bookmarker and have for about 3 years. PHP based, runs on the server, authentication, public viewing, etc. Works great!
I was trying to figure out a way to get a handle on my bookmarks about three months ago. I wound up trying a bunch of different programs, including some shareware demos. I wound up getting Powermarks. It will read in the bookmarks from all the browsers on your computer, and you can export all of the bookmarks to html. The feature that got me hooked is that you don't have to sort your bookmarks in to categories. When you create a bookmark, the name, keywords and description fields are retrieved from the web page. To find a book mark you do a search based on the info in those fields. It works amazingly well. The other nice feature is that you can sort the bookmarks based on the number of times that you have visited that web site. So your favorite bookmarks automatically rise to the top. There is a fully functional demo, with a nag screen. To get rid of the nag screen is $25, but it is worth it. Also it is only for windows.
I use Konqueror, as it can import from and export to Mozilla's bookmark format. But I don't ever have to worry about IE, so...
-Nick
There is a Yahoo plugin which adds a toolbar to either Netscape or IE (no Mozilla yet). It has a bookmark feature which you can use as ubiquitously as the one embedded into the browsers. When you add a bookmark on one system, it automatically appears in the others.
All of the programs which mearly copy the bookmark files around don't work for Mozilla at all, and don't work well for Netscape (not sure about IE). As they don't have predictable behavior when the bookmark file is modified while they're running.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
http://bookmark4u.sourceforge.net
This is the program ive used for quite some time now.
Its multi-user, and you can flag bookmarks as public/private.
Anyone with an account can see all users public bookmarks.
Private ones are hidden (except for your own of course)
Lets you add buttons to netscape/moz/ie to a) bring up the bookmarks, and b) add a bookmark to the server.
You can import/export netscape file bookmarks as well as some others, and it reads the file that IE exports to in netscape format.
I've found using a website to actually orginize bookmarks sucks alot, as each click requires a http query and is very slow.
For that I would export the whole bookmark file to my PC (One should do this for backups anyways) and use mozilla to actually move things into folders, then erase/re-import the new file.
Hope this helps
Although it doesn't seem to mention what I consider to be the idea solution -- merging the files so you don't loose anything from either machine.
Merging two or more files that have a common ancestor isn't a trivial thing to do: a simple text document is the most straight forward. Format dependent text files (e.g. program source, XML) need knowledge of the file format and may require testing for correctness after the merge. Binary file formats require intimate knowledge of the file format and (most likely) re-interpretation in a user friendly way during the merge process.
A great deal of user intervention is required for what is supposed to be a largely automated process.
Ian.
A physicist is an atom's way of thinking about atoms
My needs are varied. I am (because I am not quite done with my manager yet) forced to save my Mozilla bookmarks I keep at work, zip them up, email them home, then update my Mozilla at home. I have written some scripts on both ends to help automate this to some extent, but it is still a pain, and it doesn't address a few areas that currently exist in most bookmark lists: duplicates, categories, dead links, and accessibility.
Honestly, the first two can be thought of as almost the same problem. I keep my links very organized, in a hierarchical tree of folders and such in the Mozilla bookmark list. But sometimes (actually, a lot of times), you want to have a bookmark be in two (or more) locations at once, so when you are thinking of something, you can just browse there, get the link, and it is there. A case would be a site on converting or building a hydrogen powered vehicle - do you put it in the automotive site category, the alternate energy site category, or the diy site category - or all three? Preferably, the latter should be the option, but now you have increased your storage requirements by n-times (where n is the number of possible categories the link could fall into). You could drop all links into one folder, and put in the comments area key words to search on - but you would have to come up with a standard set of keywords. This isn't very workable. You also wouldn't know if a link has been duplicated, because the list won't tell you that. When you have hundreds of links, duplication can easily occur. There is also no way to track down and eliminate dead links (except by visiting and updating the tree manually). Finally, there is no way to access your link tree from a computer on the other side of the world, unless you stick a copy somewhere on a server every now and then.
I got sick of all this, and started to write a web-based Perl CGI system for tracking bookmarks. When I am done, it will have:
A category system, so that only one link needs to be stored, with multiple categories. Searches will be with a logic (AND, OR, NOT) system allowing you to search for multiple categories (which *are* the keywords) selected from dropdown lists (these categories are also user updatable, so categories can be added, updated, and deleted). The categories are defined with keys, which allow a category to be modified independent of its key, so that the name and description can be updated and it affects all uses (the key *cannot* be updated - a category can only be deleted if all links using it are deleted or the category dropped first). There will be a special "favorites" or "quicklink" category to show those links on the front page that are the most accessed - like Google, Slashdot, and others.
There is a user "login" database, with autorization levels, so that bookmarks and categories can be put "off-limits" to the various categories. This login system is set up such that when a user logs in, a "session key" is generated and stored (using a unique hash code made from the login and date/time stamp), which is then put into every generated link so that each area know who is accessing it, and matches the sid to what is on the login table. This allows me to eliminate the use of cookies. It isn't a perfectly secure way of doing things, but this app isn't meant to be Fort Knox, either.
There is also a ratings system (1-5 stars), which I hope to allow all users to access, so users can "rate" a site for other users.
In the future I also hope to have a system to allow users to set up "private" bookmark lists, and via the auth system allow them
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
If you use a Mac, try URL Manager Pro. It's been around for quite a while, and the developer is great (back in the day he added FTP storage by request).
To tightly integrate the product, he just went and invented shared menus, then quickly ported them to OS X when it came out.
Good stuff.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
This has been one of my pet peeves for awhile. Forget portable bookmarks for now -- it's hard enough managing them on one machine, or within each browser! Mozilla still uses a crusty old Netscape design, where moving bookmarks around, sticking them in folders, etc., is a real pain in the ass. IE is the same way. I can imagine Microsoft and Netscape might want to make this difficult, to keep people from zapping the bookmarks (advertising) these companies stick into their products.
I suspect this because IE's bookmark interface used to be better...
My favorite was with IE from a few generations ago -- maybe IE4 -- where it was just a standard file manager window. You could select, and drag and drop bookmarks en masse into folders. You can't do this with Mozilla, at least that I know of. I forget what Konquerer does -- I usually use Mozilla anyway. So my bookmarks menus grow to epic lengths, 'til I finally get disgusted, delete them, and start over. Or I don't use them at all, and just hit Google when I forget where something is.
This is ridiculous. Other people I know complain about the same thing.
blogs are great for pointing to sources, but lack the timeless quality.
bookmarks are more suited to these, resources. these sites of permanent use and interest.
we need a way to leverage the personal databases that are bookmark files, into a format along the lines of dmoz.
ie: googling only your own (sub)tree of bookmarks for results.
-so you can keyword search only, and all, the sites in your "blog" bookmark folder at once.
and even better: googling the bookmarks of the people that you have bookmarked.
-so you can keyword seach for "coffee", restricting the results to sites found in your bookmarks file, and in zeldman's/cowboyneal's/your father's/your bosses' bookmark files.
the major hurdle is who organises it. google is the obvious answer. but maybe starting small, with say a movabletype plugin, or mozilla plugin, would be the way to go.
summary: a personalized dmoz using a (2?)-degree trust web. sharable bookmarks.
.
. hmmm
I use
http://devel.thcnet.net/phpbookmarks/
it's php based, with mysql, you can easily make it secure if you wish. it works well, it's themeable to:)
never had any problems with it... just find yourself some webspace, and stick it up.
mines currently holding around 200 links or so, so those who are syaing just rember them, well, I don't have that good of memory, and google can't always find the exact link you need.
metalgeek
windows, just another pane in the glass
Hi!
Great timing on your question. I just wrote SiteBar, which is a very convienent, low-demand server based bookmark organizer.
The nicest bit, is it's made to run in the Mozilla/Netscape Sidebar, but can just as easily be run in a main window.
Looks just like your bookmark folder. I'm working on a Mozilla importer, so stay tuned.
Sign up to use mine at:
http://www.mindslip.org/sitebar
or go get it at:
http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/sitebar
Hope it's as addicting to you as it is to me.
mindslip
If you use multiple browsers and you want identical bookmarks in all of them, then get Bookit. $12 shareware, I paid for it within 10 minutes of trying it out.
C amino/whatever they're calling it this week
It lets you edit your bookmarks, and will sync the bookmark files of the following browsers:
Safari
iCab
MSIE
Mozilla
Navigator/Chimera/
Netscape
OmniWeb
Opera
If you want to put the same bookmarks on additional Macs, you can do that as well, with a little work.
Bookit also gives you the option of putting bookmark dockling in the dock and/or putting a bookmark menu extra in the menubar.
~Philly
Anybody use Powermarks from kaylon? What's interesting about this little program is that instead of using the default tree view for storing your bookmarks, you associate each BM with a few keywords. Makes searching and categorizing much easier, and it's very fast too. Unfortunately, it's only available on windows. Maybe there's a linux close out there... On the other hand, I'd like to hear for your experience with the few online bookmarks managers available. Which one's got the best/most important features?
This is what I use currently.
Free
Extremely fast
Good user interface
Upload, Download feature so that you can synce between diffrent locations.
These are all the server-based tools mentionned in the above discussion:
Active PHP Bookmarks
Bookmarker
Bookmark4U
PHP Bookmarks
Sitebar