Online Bookmarks

Posted on Monday, July 25, 2011 by TheBlackzone

From my experience, using the traditional way of bookmarking in multiple browsers ends in a complete mess. I've spent countless hours in getting my bookmarks in sync between my computers at home, at work and elsewhere and all the different browsers I use. The more my list of bookmarks grew, the more tedious the process of synchronization got.

But, as for most issues, there are several ways to solve it.

First, you may use one of the countless online services or social bookmarking sites such as delicious.com or diigo to get your bookmarks organized. While some of them have great features and functions to share bookmarks (if this is your intention), I never trusted them. It's far to easy to create a nice profile of you and your interests, just by analyzing your bookmarks and how often you click them. Now, call me paranoid, but I bet that's what most of these free services are doing in order to sell data to market research companies and the like. Anyways, if you don't care about this, I'd recommend having a look at delicious.com or Google Bookmarks.

Another way to get your bookmark stuff organized and synchronized between browsers is the use of tools, made for this specific task. In an quite old article 25+ Ways To Synchronize Your Bookmarks over at mashable.com you'll find many of them listed and explained.

And lately the maker of browser have begun to integrate synchronization support directly into their browsers, for example Firefox Sync or Google Sync Services functionality in Google Chrome, which is great if you're using the same browser everywhere.

Personally I have chosen another tool to organize my bookmarks. Since I am running my own website with database support, I am in the fortunate position to host my own online bookmarking services. In my case I'm using the not so well known tool Online-Bookmarks, which is quite excellent for this task.

Unfortunately development of "Online-Bookmarks" has been put on ice a while ago. Nevertheless, all the functionality you expect from such a tool (except for tagging) is available and works flawlessly. And if you, like me, are used to work with an hierarchical organization of your bookmarks (i.e. keeping them in folders and subfolders) rather than tagging them, there's nothing you'll be missing.

So, if you have the necessary prerequisites and want to keep your bookmarks private, yet not giving up the advantages of an online bookmark service, you should check it out. And if you like it, drop the author an email to let him know. Maybe it encourages him to continue development on this nice project.

And just in case you wonder: I've currently 2228 bookmarks in my database :-)

Tags: misc