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Handling bookmarks?

16 March 2013 21:50

I've a collection of about 500 bookmarks which I've barely touched for a few years. I started organizing them late the other night, because I'd been off work sick for two days and that was about the most I felt up for doing with a computer.

The intention was to "tidy" them, and then setup some way of syncing them across browsers/computers. In the end I didn't like any of the syncing plugins I could find - xmarks, etc - so I decided to take a step backwards.

I'd exported my bookmarks to HTML page, via firefox, before I started, and then later in a fit of pique I deleted the whole damn lot of them.

So now a few years worth of bookmarks are stored in a single HTML file. But wait, we can use revision control can't we? We can host that file on github/similar. We can rely upon merges to deal with conflicts - simple if we just add lines to the end, or delete lines.

Maybe that's the best way to store bookmarks? I updated the bookmark file to read:

<ul>
<li tags="debian, personal"><a href="http://www.debian-administration.org/">Debian Admin</a></li>
..
</ul>

Adding "tags" to the LI-container and then some simple jQuery code gave me the ability to search/filter the bookmarks and auto-populate tags.

A small example placed online here:

The obvious comment is that this makes adding new bookmarks a bit harder, but we'll see.. The javascript works in the browsers I tested, and for those that have none the bookmarks will just be a simple unordered list which should be universal.

I expect the javascript could be improved by a real developer.

| 3 comments

 

Comments on this entry

icon Adrian at 15:27 on 16 March 2013

I'm using a personal Semantic Scuttle instance. Great bookmark management software.

icon Paulo Almeida at 16:02 on 16 March 2013

I have been using owncloud's bookmarks, which aren't much different in terms of functionality (they have tags and also a bookmarklet to make it easier to add new bookmarks). Of course, they also need an owncloud instance running.

icon Steve Kemp at 17:14 on 17 March 2013
http://steve.org.uk/

Scuttle? I remember that from years ago. I used it for a while, but it got spammed mercilessly - I know I had to disable logins behind a htaccess rule.

These days I like the idea of a server-side application, but a quick google didn't find anything I like and I don't install PHP applications as a matter of policy, which rules it out - as well as owncloud.