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)?"

Comments

I got sick of this years ago

[DiSKiLLeR]

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.

Here's what I do

[Apreche]

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.

Re:Here's what I do

[PD]

What a load of work. Everyone, look up a nice little program called 'unison'. It uses the rsync protocol to keep two directories in sync. It's even transitive. You can be working on client machine A, synchronize with server S, then move to client machine B and synchronize with server S. client A and client B will be synchronized with each other.

I use it on a gigabyte of files in my home dir on my desktop and laptop. It synchronizes in less than 30 seconds on a 128kbit link.

Everything is managed with a configuration file, so you don't need to manually remember what parts need to update and what don't, and where the little bits need to go in the directory tree.

Re:Here's what I do

[PD]

Oh, and I forgot to mention that unison will synchronize using a ssh tunnel. You will be secure.

Re:Here's what I do

[muleboy]

What happens if you make changes on client A, forget to sync, then make changes on client B? That seems to me like a likely thing to happen unless the sync is either automatic or you are very reliable about remembering to do it (I am not).

I wrote a crude script that will sync bookmarks A and B, but it's not release quality. A really nice GUI version of that is needed.

Re:Here's what I do

[ibennetch]

Here is the manual's information on conflicts and conflict resolution. If I'm reading it correctly, it prompts you to decide what to do. 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.

an idea....

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:an idea....

[unsanity]

this is not "secret"--and don't even mention secure--as you're "obscure" URL will be showing up as the refer in the webserver logs. And a lot of sites generate stats dirctly from these logs (or just dump them to a web-viewable file). Should google crawl to one of these stats pages, you'll soon find your bookmarks showing up in searches for .. whatever it is you're bookmarking.

Sure, use robots.txt to solve some of that dilemma, but that won't keep a person from following the link on his own. I admit that i obsessively check out most of my refers :)

a "secret" page really can't have any links (outside your machine).

Roll your own, or use mine.

[funkwater]

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.

Re:Roll your own, or use mine.

[Zapman]

I've contemplated doing something like this for a while. Then a new feature came along to make it more challenging:

"Bookmark this group of tabs"

I love this feature. It's how I lay out my morning reading. One click, and then it's ctrl-W until done. All my comics, all the blogs, and a weather report.

Things that come to mind

[NotoriousQ]

• Run your own secure site (SSL, passwords), and just keep an html page with links. Extremely portable, but you will have to update the page yourself, no real managers. (Although Mozilla/Netscape bookmarks.html might be adequate)
• Keep your profile on a network mountable partition. Problem: may have problems mounting through firewalls and machines not owned by you
• Keep your profile on a USB flash drive keychain.

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.

Re:Things that come to mind

[darkpurpleblob]

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.

Although not an RFC standard, there is already an XML format for storing bookmarks called XBEL (XML Bookmark Exchange Language). You can find more about it here.

BibTeX, Google, Memory

[Zach Garner]

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.

-----

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.

Backflip

[XBL]

Give this a try. It's a free, advanced web-based bookmarking service. Lots of features.

Wiki

[phUnBalanced]

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.

For Mozilla...

[elfkicker]

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 bookmarks

[zeenixus]

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.

Re:yahoo bookmarks

[seanmeister]

Also - you can add your Yahoo bookmarks to the Mozilla sidebar using the following procedure:

1. Make sure your Moz sidebar is visible (press F9)
2. Go to this page.
3. Enter "Yahoo Bookmarks" (or whatever you want) in the Tab Name field.
4. Enter the following URL in the Tab URL field:
   
   http://my.yahoo.com/internet/t/sites.html
   
   
5. Click the Preview Tab button - this will actually add the tab to your sidebar.

Works for me :-)

Does anyone still use bookmarks?

[hkon]

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" :)

Re:Does anyone still use bookmarks?

[mivok]

Thats great, when you want to look at new sites, or only want to keep track of a few.
When you want to look up a lot of the same sites regularly any method other than bookmarks/open in tabs simply doesnt cut it imho. E.g. I have one set of tabs for all of the news sites/forums I read - just fire up open in tabs and post away, or much more valuable, all the web comic sites I read daily (userfriendly, garfield, dilber, sinfest, megatokyo etc..) are in a sinlge bookmark folder, which saves me having to type in ~10 different urls (and growing fast) for what amounts to about 30 seconds of reading funnies.

As for keeping bookmarks in sync, I still havent solved that problem satisfactorily - thankfully I only use two different profiles atm, so I just copy the bookmarks.html file over from one computer to another whenever I modify it. Web based bookmarks would be nice, but you lost the open in tabs feature, and its much nicer having everything on a little toolbar rather than having to wait for a website to load.

The only thing I could think of would be a script that reguarly checks a central location for the bookmarks file, and updates it cvs style when changes are made locally (cvs itself seems a little overkill but you get the idea).
One alternative I am not sure is possible would be to store your profile online, this would require you use the same browser across the board (I do), but could concevably slow everything down each time it access the profile across the net.

Yahoo! Companion

[mechugena]

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.

FOUND IT!

[mildness]

link to unison proggie

Not just Karma whoring, I'm downloading now. (:-{)}

Thanks for the heads-up PD.

Cheers,

Bill

CVS!

[balog]

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...

Re:Back in my day..

[vskjefst]

Latest version of Opera (7.1B1) can export bookmarks to HTML if that helps you.

ACAP

[Engdy]

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?

Merging is non-trivial

[Ian Jefferies]

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.

Great timing! I just wrote SiteBar

[mindslip]

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