Jun 18
Bookmark sync for FireFox 0.9
2004 at 01.41 am posted by Veerle Pieters
I already had a wish list for FireFox to make it a perfect browser but now it seems that one item from that list is solved. Meet the Bookmarks Synchronizer for Firefox.
If you’re like me and work on different machines it is handy to keep all these bookmarks with CSS tips, hacks etc handy. Until this plug-in this was kind of hassle. I always used my dot Mac account for that. With iSync you can sync your Safari bookmarks and upload them to the dot Mac page. This didn’t work for FireFox of course, you had to login to your dot Mac and use the bookmark window to see them but there was no way to sync them. This plug-in comes close to perfection. Perfection would be a plug-in that works for all browsers.
Using your own FTP server you can now sync FireFox cross platform, so yes on Mac and PC! This free plug-in writes an XML file to your FTP server which can then be retrieved and parsed by any version of Firefox. Now you can easily share, sync, and update all your bookmarks. A recommend download for every FireFox fan out there.
13served
1
It’s also a darn sight faster than a .mac sync too!
2
It has been two years since I last used local bookmarks. I always forgot to back them up before I did a reinstall (of Windows), so I even lost them completely a few times. An other bad side effect of local bookmarks, was off course that I couldn’t check them at school, and later, at work.
But I have found the answer to all these problems. All my bookmarks are stored online now (about a thousand of them). I use the opensource utility Bookmark4U for this. Using a handy bookmarklet, I can easily add a new bookmark while surfing. In fact, that bookmarklet (to add bookmarks) together with the actual link to my online bookmark overview, are the only two real bookmarks I have in all my browsers.
Good thing is, you can always download a html-file of your online stored bookmarks. So if you decide to stop using Bookmark4u, you just do an export. End of story.
Download and try Bookmark4U here:
http://bookmark4u.sourceforge.net/
3
To build on Frederiks’ post after testing many solutions I’ve been using active php bookmarks for over a year now build by Brandon Stone (photoblogs) and abandoned since oct 2003 it is a breeze to use and customize to your taste you can grab a copy here: lbstone.com/apb/?version=1.1.02
4
Oh, I’m certainly gonna try this out. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for some time. The XML-FTP thing sounds cool, it should be possible to get it straight onto my page also (which is an idea I like, I don’t mind people see my bookmarks, only when you have a ‘links-page’ it’s always outdated ;-))
Well, I did run into some trouble to get 0.9 emerging on my Gentoo-box, but I’m sure I’ll be able to fix it anytime soon…
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I hate it how every time a new version comes out you’ve got to wait for all the extentions to catch up… there’s alway that period where the functionality of your browser is slightly crippled.
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Veerle, the extention you linked to is an absolute godsend. This is pretty much the optimal solution, aside from being mozilla only (for now).
However, since it is in xml, it should be really easy to implement into safari (/konqueror) and probably even IE too…
...and plugging it into your website as Markie suggested would be really really nice too, though I don’t know enough *cough* any *cough* XSLT to make that happen properly. Do any other readers of Veerle´s blog know how?
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Why is this entry so similar to Todd Dominey’s @ http://www.whatdoiknow.org ? =
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@Stefan, so is this a crime? I happen to talk about the same subject that’s all :-S I see no problem here.
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OMG… why is it that people think only one person is allowed to link to something? I visit Veerle’s blog, but I don’t visit Todd’s(?), so I get to read it here… If you buy two newspapers, are you gonna complain if there are similar articles in both?
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Haha! I managed to get Firefox 0.9 running :-) (always a little hassle, compiling it on Linux..) let the good times begin!
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And just for reference, I’ve found some info about how to create html from xbel docs (the xml type this extention uses):
A XSL stylesheet for xbel docs:
http://twistedmatrix.com/wiki/moin/xbel_2d1_2e0_2exsl
An Apache module to convert xbel docs into dynamic html pages:
http://www.aaronland.info/perl/apache/xbel/docs.html
I haven’t tried them yet, but I will Real Soon (tm), and link to them from on my site.
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No reason to get hostile. I just found it rather interesting that your entry was oddly similar to Todd’s. I am not insisting that only one person is allowed to link a particular site; I was just curious whether your entry was a reworded version of Todd’s? There’s no harm in that.
=)
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@Stefan: Nobody here is hostile. If you want to avoid this in the future maybe you should have written it much more clearly what your intension was. In my opinion you’re asking for it ;-)