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Cross Platform Browser Bookmark Autosyncing?
Milo_Mindbender asks: "So, geek that I am, I have several computers at home and several at the office, these come in both Windows and Linux flavors. Most have a copy of Firefox but for various reasons some have Mozilla and Internet Explorer too. Naturally, I'm going crazy trying to keep all the bookmarks in sync. Has anyone seen anything that can do this AUTOMATICALLY? I'd really like to just be able to use the 'add bookmark' feature in any browser and have them all sync up every now an then (each launch or at least each day). Various searches return tons of hits on bookmark managers, far too many to try them all out...so has anyone found anything that works?"
One option is a firefox extension called Bookmarksftp which basically uploads your bookmarks to a ftp server and downloads them as and when asked (or automattically). A version compatible with Firefox 0.10 is available here
To get the bookmarks in IE bookmarkstofav will do, but theres no proper version for Firefox 0.10
I also want to keep read-news in sync (gmane, etc)
Also read-mail in sync. Thunderbird does IMAP badly, Outlook Express did a better job, and emails marked as read on one machine are then marked as read on another machine even if the messages have already been downloaded on the other computer. I use thunderbird exclusively now.
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
As a geek with several computers at home you surely have your own web server running somewhere. Do what I do...just create a page of your favorite links. I do that and set it as my home page on all the computers I use.
If you want to get fancy set it up with a database backend for easy update.
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"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
http://www.spurl.com/ Allows you to access your bookmarks anywhere.
If you don't mind somebody else storing your bookmarks, you could use Spurl. You bookmark the current page using a bookmarklet, or you can bulk upload your bookmarks. You access them on the spurl site or from the sidebar.
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
I'm going to assume you've either heard of http://del.icio.us and dont like it, or you've been living under a rock for the past few months. Delicious isnt everything youre looking for I'm sure but it is pretty neat. It's been around for almost a year but just in the past month it has gotten insanely popular.
:)
Now it doesnt sync your bookmarks with your browsers, instead it's an online place to store your bookmarks. What many people think is the best thing about it, including myself, is that you dont organize your bookmarks into folders. Instead you give them tags, and each bookmark can have more than one tag. A tag is basically just a category.
So for example if you're a web develper such as myself and you find something on javascript that just tickles you pink, then you click your little bookmarklet to add a post to delicious (there are many third party tools available as well), then tag it as "web dev javascript" or however you want (that's what I'd do)
At this point I only have about ~50 bookmarks so its not too handy yet but it will be. If I want to see all bookmarks on development, I can just type in "dev". If I want web development, I can type "web dev". If I want to see just javascript thigns, I can type "web dev javascript" or just "javascript". It's really cool because your bookmarks can fall under an unlimited number of categories, rather than the old structure of trying to figure out the one specific place you want to put this bookmark.
The other good thing is obviously you can access it from any computer on the internet, and not just the ones you normally use. I have already found this aspect of it very useful.
It's also a cool way to see what people are interested in that day. delicious/popular shows the top 20 or so links that have been added each day. If you want to see what other people have found that's interesting on javascript for example, you can just go to delicious/tag/javascript and it will show the last ~100 links that have been added to the site and tagged with "javascript". And each link it shows will also show how many other people have that same link bookmarked, so it's easy to find the popular things in any category.
I recommend it if you haven't checked it out already.
Joseph?
I've been using yahoo toolbar for the last few years and it's a life saver. I have used to access the same set of bookmarks on countless office & home computers, even when I moved across the country for the summer. Check it out.
You just bookmark using the toolbar, instead of the native browser. You can import/export/organize/etc.
I think they limit you to 1000 but that hasn't been an issue for me yet.
If that does not work, then there are several people who have mentioned using either yahoo's toolbar, or some other online tool that deals with that for you.
I am supprised that there is no extension. Alternatively, if you have web space you could upload your bookmarks to you own web space on line then just use that as the master. Of course you'd ahv to find a way to protect your data.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
sorry - I missed the "cross platform" bit above. I have no idea if yahoo toolbar works on anything but wintel. oops.
Netscape used to have something that would do this called Roaming Profile. It would sync with an LDAP server. That functionality is being recreated in Mozilla but it has been a low priority. Take a look at bug 17917 at bugzilla.mozilla.org and vote for it if you want to see it finished anytime soon.
we really need some sort of standardized XML bookmark format for sharing between platforms and browsers. since most browsers don't extend their bookmarking functionality beyond a simple name/description/folders system, one simple format would be enough.
In fact, data standardization could be good for a lot of things. vCard and vCalendar (now iCal) were both incredibly successful (vCal less so after MS dumped it).
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Any suggestions -- such as an Export option I might have overlooked -- would be appreciated. I'd like to make these transitions as simple and transparent as possible.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
http://www.horde.org/trean/
Bookmarks Synchroniser
h p? id=14
http://update.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.p
My Journal
You just gave me an idea.
1) Write your bookmarks into an RSS feed. You should be able to use a nice web page to populate a db and dynamically generate RSS from it.
2) Use Firefox 1.0PR, which has "live bookmarks."
3) Add the RSS feed to your Mozilla bookmarks once per machine.
Wham! Instant sync'ed bookmarks stored on your own webserver, dynamically generated each time you use them.
People who use Macs from multiple locations can use iSync and Apple's .mac service to synchronize bookmarks across all of the macs.
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quoted from the website:
Linkagogo now provides the server side support for the SyncIt client. This means you don't need to install and configure your own web server for the BookmarkSync server component. With linkaGoGo you can immediately start synchronizing all your linkaGoGo favorites with PCs where you have SyncIt installed.
Try Sitebar. It runs on a PHP/MySQL server (public servers available) and there are plugins/extensions for major browsers.
i have already been thinking about this for a while
there are lots of these services that make a stab at it for online a reader pointed out spurl but for the fact www.furl.net got there first and got taken over so a bunch of people are trying to get taken over as well (great exit plan...)
frankly it's really easy to do this kind of service and with a bit of javascript to submit the url (all browsers can submit)
the problem is that NONE of these services actually bring up the bookmark in your "Favorites" or "bookmarks" widget which sucks
I like the thing that someone said about RSS and live bookmarks but it no workee on MS IE6 or apple safari
frankly people need to look at apple.com/isync
thats how it should be done
so store it online or build a sync server that knows how to mangle bookmarks into favorites and is cross platform
regards
John Jones
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=4174 2
I used to do this through the old netscape.com Actually it was a tool to encourage switching browsers, and make that easier for you. It was also integrated with a webmail account, which I think they planned to make money on. Of course it went away with Netscape itself.
Personally, I used the service to migrate all my settings from Windows to Linux, and then back again, as well as keep a backup of my address book.
The question is there a way to sync.
Not how to use one copy of bookmarks on multiple browsers.
I use mozilla on multiple computers. My linux laptop at home. My wife's XP laptop. My linux desktop at work. My Macintosh at work. All running mozilla. Forget other platforms for now.
I want to be able to bookmark -> bookmark this page on any one of these and have it show up on all the other browsers from the Bookmarks tab. With my catagories, etc.
I've used a perl script (bookmark merge?) to sync netscape/mozilla bookmarks. It's a pain.
I want sync to work like my palm pilot. I sync to jpilot at home and work. To iSync and to Windows PalmDesktop. I've synced it to an exchange server, Evolution and Lotus Notes. Changes in one propogate to all the others.
I have an app that copies the palm to the cell phone. Any time I update the palm I can reimport and copy over the cell phone. This will wipe out anything in the phone, erasing what's there. I could copy the cell data to the palm stuff, but it would be a duplicate to what's there.
This means I have to maintain & manually sync 2 sets of data in 2 locations. This is fine for small amounts of data in a small number of locations. My bookmarks.html file is 250k.
I want something like palm syncing for Mozilla bookmarks. Anything less is half way.
I use Yahoo bookmarks with a javascript link that automatically bookmarks the current page. I've added the following bookmark to my toobar in Firefox and IE:
d (o pen('http://bookmarks.yahoo.com/config/edit_bookma rk?.url='+escape(location.href)+'&.name='+escape(d ocument.title)+'&.protocol=http%3a//&.folder=1&.sa ve=Save&.action=ab&.bmprop=1&.src=bookmarks&.done= '+escape(location.href), 'bookmarks', 'resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes,toolbar=no,width=700 ,height=500'));
javascript:q=location.href;p=document.title;voi
Then, whenever I click the link, it adds the current page to my Yahoo bookmarks.
... considering safari STILL can't import bookmarks.
Macintosh != innovation!
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
Neither Furl nor Delicious nor Spurl really full-text index your bookmarks, and I find that to be a MAJOR minus in their service. Simpy, on the other hand, crawls and re-crawls pages you bookmarked, which lets you make full-text searches against your own and other users' indices, a la Google.
Simpy: Simpy.
Demo: demo account (shared, be nice)
Simpy
I made a mistake.
in tests before I submit a bug report I found that latest TB DOES correctly update the read-message status from the remote IMAP folder.
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
It actually doesn't. From the site:
There is a link to a FireFox toolbar, but that only works on Windows as well.Having a password protected bookmark manager sounds like the best option. BlinkTo has a nice icon feature also, making it easy to find bookmarks.
Any ideas?