Centralized Bookmarks »
So I've felt a certain tug to try del.icio.us. There's a similar tug for flickr, but I've been able to keep that one at bay for the time being.
For del.icio.us, I even wrote a quick extension because I didn't like the way their bookmarks worked in Firefox and I didn't like the existing del.icio.us extension. Too much stuff for my tastes. Perhaps I just don't know how to use the service, and that's where I get stuck.
I don't think I'm much of a browser. It just isn't very often that I go looking for more stuff. Most often I'm just trying to manage the stuff that I already have. And so the idea of del.icio.us as a bookmark manager of sorts sounds cool. The social aspect is okay too, but not so important to me.
The problem is I can't seem to get to the bookmarks in an easy way. Don't get me wrong - it's simple to go to my bookmarks page. The problem is that I don't want to do that. I don't use bookmarks much now because they get in my way. I keep a fairly trim list in the Firefox sidebar, but even a lot that are there I don't use because it's not as easy as it could be.
I want a way that I can see those bookmarks easily and use them. I could open a tab in Firefox and just flip over there when I want something. But that's not what I'm looking to do. I think that I want an always-on bookmark sidebar. Much like the one that's built-in to Firefox. But I want it centrally stored, and del.icio.us is close, but their page is ugly if you load it in the sidebar. The XML doesn't seem to update, or there seems to be some sort of caching in effect, because it doesn't always update immediately.
Obviously there's this issue of getting the data if it's stored elsewhere. I want the sidebar to be up-to-date. I don't think that it needs to poll every few seconds, as I don't add bookmarks that often. Probably just once when the browser starts and then again after adding any new bookmarks. I'm not too concerned about updating them on one computer, and then not seeing the change immediately reflected on another computer. I just don't think I'm going to be able to do that in the current del.icio.us incarnation.
Maybe I just need to toy with this extension - or even the other one - some more and see if I can make those bookmarks work the way I want them. Just wish I knew what I was looking to do - that always makes it so much easier.
Comments (4)
I agree. I've started using Firefox's LiveBookmark feature to subscribe to some of my del.icio.us links. About the only sites I read regularly that don't use RSS feeds are Web Comics (and some of those are starting to use RSS as well). So I subscribe to my Comics feed, which works reasonably well unless del.icio.us is slow or down.
Posted by Scott Milling on October 29, 2004 3:02 PM
Have you seen the Foxylicious extension? It will download your del.icio.us bookmarks and put them into a folder with the rest of your bookmarks. You can then use this bookmark folder as your sidebar, and get most of what you're talking about.
Posted by Darren Chamberlain on October 29, 2004 5:52 PM
Thanks for the link, I had seen it but not really checked it out. Looks like the Foxylicious extension suffers from the same problem of many other solutions - the updating. Namely, looks like it's a manual process.
I did, however, find my way to the Bookmarks Synchronizer extension. The downloadable version isn't set for the release candidates, but by changing the MaxVersion variable, it seems as if it installed without a problem.
I like that it has a "download on open" and an "upload on close" option to keep the FTP file in sync with the local version. I think that this one might do it. I'll report back.
Posted by Chad Everett on October 29, 2004 6:11 PM
I wanted what you want, and wrote my own little site for it. I made it so that anybody can use it. It's here if you're interested.
Posted by Rudis on January 29, 2007 9:24 PM