Most Usable Bookmark Managers? 88
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)?"
I got sick of this years ago (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:I got sick of this years ago (Score:1)
Urhm, uh, yeah... "bookmarks". There, i said the word, so i should be ontopic
Actually, to be honest, i do have 2 bookmarks in Camino (Chimera's new name). Its so i can get into Netbanking, and my bigpond cable usage meter easier... Camino also has my login/pass saved so i don't have to try and remember those wierd cyrptic shit that i was assigned with.
D.
Re:I got sick of this years ago (Score:1)
Re:I got sick of this years ago (Score:2)
1) a working memory
2) an internet connection
and
3) Google.
Re:I got sick of this years ago (Score:1)
--I just made my own little Web page with all the sites I go to on a daily/frequent basis, and posted it on free site providers. My current one is on Tripod.
Here's what I do (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
Here's what I [did] (Score:1)
Re:Here's what I do (Score:2, Informative)
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 (Score:2, Informative)
Merging is non-trivial (Score:2, Insightful)
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:Merging is non-trivial (Score:1)
Re:Merging is non-trivial (Score:1)
This is OK most of the time since most of what I do is add folders and bookmarks, and much less often m
FOUND IT! (Score:4, Informative)
Not just Karma whoring, I'm downloading now. (:-{)}
Thanks for the heads-up PD.
Cheers,
Bill
Re:FOUND IT! (Score:2)
Uh, wtf? Either you have a mexican style mustache and a goatee, or perhaps more accurately, that's Kripsy Kreme residue around your mouth?
Re:FOUND IT! (Score:1)
Like it's owner, my smiley is bald, has a mustache and a beard.
Good guesses. (;-{)}
Re:Here's what I do (Score:1)
Re:Here's what I do (Score:2)
Re:Here's what I do (Score:1)
I access the share via typing \\mypc.mydomain.edu
What?! You have SMB accessible externally? Do you have any idea of security?
an idea.... (Score:4, Insightful)
yeah - it's security through obscurity - but it'll fly.
Re:an idea.... (Score:1)
of course, this only addresses the accessibility issue. there's still the matter of simplifying the addition and deletion of marks from any of the machines you may use...
Re:an idea.... (Score:2, Insightful)
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
Roll your own, or use mine. (Score:4, Interesting)
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. (Score:1)
Re:Roll your own, or use mine. (Score:1)
I don't know php either... but if you put it in sourceforge I'll try it too... I might even help me learn php...
Re:Roll your own, or use mine. (Score:1)
Hilarious.
I did, well... exactly the same thing. I could help with this.
Re:Roll your own, or use mine. (Score:3, Insightful)
"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.
Re:Roll your own, or use mine. (Score:1)
It may be possible to hack this in with javascript, but I haven't tried anything with javscript and tabs yet (I'm sure there is no standards here either).
I'll start a SourceForge project this weekend and post it here.
Re:Roll your own, or use mine. (Score:1)
email me if you want to discuss further...
Thanks,
M.
Re:Roll your own, or use mine. (Score:1)
Things that come to mind (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
BibTeX, Google, Memory (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Backflip (Score:1)
Wiki (Score:2, Interesting)
It's easy to edit, as well as easily accessible.
Re:Wiki... security (Score:1)
For Mozilla... (Score:3, Informative)
bug 124029 [mozilla.org]
I believe there are other bugs/implementations in bugzilla, so you might want to hunt around.
Re:For Mozilla... (Score:1)
Re:For Mozilla... (Score:1)
"Sorry links to bugzilla from slashdot are disables"
Only if you send them a HTTP Referer header. Why don't you just get a better browser, or a proxy that will remove the header for you?
Re:For Mozilla... (Score:1)
Re:For Mozilla... (Score:2)
Re:For Mozilla... (Score:2)
Um, I'm using Phoenix [mozilla.org], what better browser is there?
Um, the next version of Phoenix... ;-) Anyway, if you are using Phoenix then you're set... just copy the link location and paste it back into phoenix. No more REFERRER. Not sure if the paste-into-the-body thing works for all the platforms, tho...
Re:For Mozilla... (Score:2)
Wow, and here I thought I was 1337 because I figured out how to do this in IE.
yahoo bookmarks (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Yahoo! Companion (Score:2)
Re:yahoo bookmarks (Score:3, Informative)
Also - you can add your Yahoo bookmarks to the Mozilla sidebar using the following procedure:
http://my.yahoo.com/internet/t/sites.html
Works for me :-)
Re:yahoo bookmarks (Score:2)
Are there similar links to various
Slashdot panels?
Re:yahoo bookmarks (Score:2)
http://www.im1ru12.org/mozilla/sidebar/
enjoy
Re:yahoo bookmarks (Score:1)
Now what's an important bookmark? Links to the web interfaces for the various servers I manage. Custom search links for our request tracking system (RT).
For anything else I rely on memory or Google. And certainly if there's an important URL I forgot and can't find again when on another system, I put in onto Yahoo as soon as I track it down again.
But I'm not one of those people who's saving tons of bookmarks all
Post... (Score:2)
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 havi
Re:Post... (Score:1)
Re:Post... (Score:2)
Does anyone still use bookmarks? (Score:4, Interesting)
(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? (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Too bad you aren't using *nix (Score:2)
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.
Back in my day.. (Score:2)
Wasnt that simple, sensible, and a generally good way to do things?
Why the fuck did everyone stop doing that?
Re:Back in my day.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Back in my day.. (Score:1)
Re:Back in my day.. (Score:2)
Look at ~/.mozilla/profilename/secretdir/bookmarks.html
Savethis (Score:2)
CVS! (Score:2, Insightful)
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...
Active PHP Bookmarks (Score:1)
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.
What is really needed! (Score:2)
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 documen
I created flyrt.com just for this purpose (Score:1)
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 pub
Re:I created flyrt.com just for this purpose (Score:1)
PowerMarks (Score:1)
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:
ACAP (Score:2, Informative)
Bookmarker (Score:1)
Re:Bookmarker (Score:1)
Powermarks (Score:1)
Konqueror (Score:1)
-Nick
Yahoo plugin (Score:1)
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 runni
Re: (Score:1)
Bookmark4u (Score:2)
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 u
I wanted one... (Score:2)
My needs are varied. I am (because I am not quite
Try URL Manager Pro (Score:2)
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.
Even browser bookmark managers suck! (Score:2)
I suspect this because
Re:Even browser bookmark managers suck! (Score:2)
leveraging bookmarks (Score:1)
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
phpbookmarks (Score:1)
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.
Great timing! I just wrote SiteBar (Score:3, Informative)
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
For Mac OS X, Bookit. (Score:2)
It lets you edit your bookmarks, and will sync the bookmark files of the following browsers:
Safari
iCab
MSIE
Mozilla
Navigator/Chimera/C amino/whatever they're calling it this week
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 bookmar
Powermarks and online bookmark managers (Score:2)
Use mybookmarks.com (Score:1)
Free
Extremely fast
Good user interface
Upload, Download feature so that you can synce between diffrent locations.
server-based bookmark managers (Score:2)
These are all the server-based tools mentionned in the above discussion:
Active PHP Bookmarks [freshmeat.net]
Bookmarker [renaghan.com]
Bookmark4U [sourceforge.net]
PHP Bookmarks [thcnet.net]
Sitebar [sourceforge.net]