Thursday, November 27, 2008

Bookmark Syncing Between Different Machines

Working on several machine during the course of the day I found myself in the need of the same bookmarks on each of them. Easier said then done. Manual syncing of bookmarks is a pain and due to the sheer amount of entries is almost impossible.

So in order to be able to check all my photography sites on those different machines I was looking for a tool to do the work for me. I ended up using foxmarks which is an add-on to the firefox browser. It is easy to install and easy to set up.

Installation

While using firefox, visit the following link and choose to install the extension:

http://www.foxmarks.com/

Once you have restarted firefox you will be able to go through the setup procedure that will enable you to save your bookmarks as well as your passwords on the foxmark servers. The passwords will be encrypted with the AES-256 algorithm and should supposedly be save. Nevertheless I did not feel quire comfortable to have the passwords save on them foxmark servers and was happy to use the possibility to use my own server to do so.

Using your own server

In the Advanced panel you can specify your own server to save your bookmars and you passwords. You can eiter use an ftp or a webdav account. Foxmark is recommending a webdav account. The bookmarks and the passwords will be saved in a single file each. Simply check the tick box that you want to use your own server and provide the necessary information, being the URL to the bookmarks and the password file. I chose to use the media center of one of my email accounts ( www.gmx.net). If you have already used firefox and their servers, don't forget to change the login information to reflect your webdav account.