29th Nov
2005

One of the reasons why I decided to give Flock and del.icio.us a try was because of a very common problem: keeping my bookmarks synchronised between machines. I have a desktop and a laptop, and the desktop runs both Windows and Slackware Linux, depending on what I'm up to.

I did try a method written about on texturizer.net (which has since disappeared) outlining a solution based on keeping the bookmarks.html file in a place where both Windows and Linux can read and write to, which boils down to having it sat on a Windows FAT32 partition. With my current Windows partition being NTFS, writing from Firefox under Linux back to Windows isn't really possible. And of course this doesn't solve the problem with synchronising to/from my laptop.

I've also tried making use of SyncBack, which is a rather nifty program allowing one to copy, backup or synchronise certain files and folders between machines. Its very flexible: you can set up multiple tasks with separate schedules. You can select folders to synchronise and even filter which files within that folder are checked.

The problems with this method is relying on running the app (Windows only), and having Windows Scheduler enabled. So unless I was writing to a FAT32 partition on my desktop machine and was using the trick mentioned above, Linux would be left out of the loop. I'd also have to have both machines on and connected to the same network. Another problem with this method is that Firefox seems to write the bookmarks file regardless of whether you've changed anything - so synchronising always results in the bookmarks file from the Firefox last run, rather than last changed.

So, I tried Flock and del.icio.us. OK, I can access my bookmarks from anywhere now, but for browsing bookmarks quickly del.icio.us' interface just doesn't cut it for me when compared to a standard tree based menu. Flock goes some way to solving that with its integrated del.icio.us bookmarks, but as I've previously mentioned, I'm not a fan of its lack of standard navigation and its tag-based browsing.

So, I'll finally shut up and get to the point: This extension is the shizznit:

> "Keeping your bookmarks synchronized between different computers is difficult since operating systems represent data differently. While social bookmarking sites like [digg](http://digg.com/] and del.icio.us, or RSS readers like Google's Personalized Home and Bloglines let account holders store links and feeds to their favorite sites, I've found that I still want to use traditional bookmarks, but am frustrated when I move between my different computers and they are not there. With the Bookmarks Synchronizer Firefox extension and an FTP account, this problem goes away. If you don't have access to an FTP server, I'll show you how to setup a free account at Ripway that you can use with this extension. I've successfully used Bookmarks Synchronizer with the latest version of Firefox, on Windows and OS X. The extension can even be configured to upload bookmarks when you close Firefox, and download them when you open it—making it even more convenient."