Returning to Apple... How to sync bookmarks?

[Thurston Garden]

After an absence of 10 years, I am going to return to Apple.

I have always been on the lookout for a low power desktop to do browsing, iPlayer, watch DVD's and serve up my music to my Squeezeboxes.. The Mac Mini seems to fit the bill and there's some sort of shopping extravaganza on Apple's products on Friday. There is some t'internet chat about 25% discounts

I will continue to use my Dell laptop, principally at work, but wondered if anyone has a good method of syncing firefox bookmarks between several computers? There appear to be a few add-ons for FF in addition to delicious, but I am not sure what will be best!

Does anyone do this? Any pro-apple chat would be good too!

Ta.

[grahoom]

hello,

have you tried?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4496

not tried out the link above but it might be what you're after.

I use a Mac (at work and sometimes at home - have an old g4 laptop at home) - and a PC laptop running Ubuntu (a flavour of linux). I also use windows some of the time (girlfriend has a windows xp lap top).

my preferred OS is a linux OS, but that might well be because I am a developer and it's a nice environment for a developer to be in.

But, the mac mini is great - I have two at work that I use as web severs (for the intranet - they have linux on them though).

If you need any help regarding your mac then give us a shout.

[wulf]

I don't store anything except a few items for quick reference on my browser. Instead, I make use of delicious.com so that I can access my bookmarks whatever machine I'm at - in particular between my Linux and Windows machines at work and my Mac at home (thumbs up for the Mac Mini). The ability to add tags and thus find a bookmark by multiple routes (or find only those tagged X and Y) is brilliant and works much better than the simple in-browser structure of nested folders.

Delicious seems to have pretty good reliability and, since bookmarks are only any good if I'm connected to the Internet, putting them in the "cloud" seems a good strategy. You can also create a backup file - mine has reached about 760KB (for about 3,700 bookmarks) - which could be loaded into a browser if required.

Wulf

[Thurston Garden]

Thanks chaps. Most helpful.

I am pleased you both gave the mini thumbs up! I am getting VERY excited!

[John Headstrong]

the Mac mini is nice, but the last one I used had linux on it

I just don't get out enough to have to sync my bookmarks, although I use delicious and I do save a html backup of my bookmarks in my dropbox https://www.dropbox.com/ when I think I will need to be on another machine.

but I saw this the other day https://mozillalabs.com/weave/ and it looks quite interesting. I might even try it myself.

[Cloud]

I have mac mini at home, and so does OH, plus one at work, and used Macs for the last 20+ years. My first was a Mac Classic II with a B/W 7" screen. Still have that one , although it now boots in to some 68k Debian experiment (one of these "lets see if it can run Linux" experiments - it did, but not well). I also have a Linux box at home and one at work and a Vista laptop. I like the Mac best.

The result is that I'm moving from machine to machine, so a way of syncing bookmarks might be quite useful. What I do now is to use Google to look for part remembered URLs and also a bit of guess work. In this way bookmarks do slowly 'sync' themselves between machines, albeit slowly. For example I now have an 'ish' bookmark on all machines.

But I'm not sure that I want the same set of bookmarks on all machines. It saves clutter to have different, focused sets for each machine. Of course I have a core set but that's relatively small small I think.

I like the cloud idea. That even covers the times you're using someone else's machine, or are at a cyber cafe.

[wulf]

What I do is tag some of my links as "quicklink". I can then use the Firefox live bookmark feature to subscribe (eg. the forums I regularly check are here). This is a way of creating core lists out of the thousands of things I've marked.

One of the things I like about tagging is that it can develop over time. For example, I often try and find something I think I remember storing by guessing a tag or two. If the process takes longer, I'll make sure I update the tags so that, next time, I will probably find it more easily.

Wulf

[John Headstrong]

I have installed https://mozillalabs.com/weave/ due to the fact that I have broken my laptops sound port so I need a machine with sounds to play music, so I installed on my laptop and on this new machine (well it is new to me anyway)

I must say, I am happy, it has taken all my bookmarks (which there are not that many but the Bookmarks Toolbar I use all the time) and all of my visited sites, passwords, start pages, and prolly other stuff. It is quite strange, being on a newly installed Ubuntu machine but having all the tweaks from a well used and tinkered firefox.