For years I had many sets of bookmarks, one at the office, and one on each computer at home. I regularly copied bookmarks between them, especially when I got a new computer. But still the bookmarks on different computers grew apart. There are many social bookmarking services out there, I tried some of those, but they lacked the convenience I wanted to add and organize my bookmarks and mostly it wasn't trivial to keep them private (they are social bookmarking services after all).
In early 2006 I tried the Foxmarks extensions and found that it was what I was looking for, a simple way to share my bookmarks amongst the computers that I use. To use Foxmarks, you need to run Firefox and install the Foxmarks extension.
Once installed, the setup wizard will help you create an account on the Foxmarks server and upload your initial bookmarks. If you are installing Foxmarks on a second or third computer just indicate during the setup process that you already have an account and let Foxmarks synchronize your bookmarks with the ones you already uploaded. The Foxmarks server functions as the central repository to and from where Firefox will upload and download your bookmarks.
At any time you can go to the Foxmarks menu in Firefox, which you will find under the Bookmarks menu. There you can set your userid and password, choose for automatic synchronization and synchronization at shutdown or manually initiate a synchronization.
Tip: Besides sharing bookmarks between your work and home computers, you can also share bookmarks across different operating systems, as Firefox runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. This is also practical if you have a dual-boot system, you can have the same bookmarks under Windows as you do under Linux. And don't forget when you buy a new computer all you need to do to get your bookmarks on them is install Foxmarks and enter your account details.
In addition to synchronizing your bookmarks across all your computers, you can also access your bookmarks online, through myFoxmarks, from anywhere in the world. Which can be practical at times.
The myFoxmarks site, which has undergone a mayor revamp in July 2007, also has handy tools to manage your bookmarks. Besides editing, deleting and creating new bookmarks, you can drag and drop bookmarks and folders and there's a preview feature. Last but not least there is a search feature to search within your bookmarks. Taking it all into consideration it seems better than the bookmark organizer that comes with the browser.
If you do not want to upload your bookmarks to the Foxmarks server, you can use your own server. Either using FTP or WebDAV. Go to the advanced settings in the Other tab enter your server and path and the type of upload you want to use (either FTP or WebDAV via HTTP or HTTPS). Note that you will not be able to use the myFoxmarks service if you do this.
You can use any server on the Internet, in your office or at home as the central system on which to store your bookmarks, as long as you have an FTP or WebDAV server running on it. So you can set Foxmarks up in such a way that your bookmarks stay on systems you control but still benefit from the ease of sharing them between many computers.
To use this add-on (extension):
For bug reports, requests or other reasons,
contact me by E-mail:
otto2003(at)de-voogd(dot)com
