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Foxmarks

23:03 Mon 08 Jan 2007
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I’ve wanted bookmark synchronization between machines for quite some time. I’ve been trying to do it myself, using Subversion, but that’s proved awkward and annoying (not through any fault of Subversion’s). There are plenty of services that offer remote bookmark hosting, and there was the sadly undeveloped Bookmarks Synchronizer, but neither fit my purposes. So now I’m trying Foxmarks.

So far, so good. First of all, they let you run it on your own server, either over FTP or WebDAV—a critical advantage, in my view. On top of that, their plugin is free software, licensed under the Apache License 2.0.

(Installing WebDAV under OpenBSD turned out to be a terrible pain. The most important thing I learned, apart from things like mod_dav wanting paths relative-to-chroot and its permissions pickiness, is that the DavLockDB option refers not to the directory in which mod_dav is going to put the lock file, but is rather the name of the lock file itself. When the permissions etc. matter so much, that’s a rather huge thing, and I would swear that the docs are written in such a way as to suggest that it’s a place to put the lock file, and not the lock file itself…)

If it works as it’s supposed to (and it’s worked just fine so far), then it’s going to quickly become one of my favorite plugins. I really want to be able to easily add bookmarks—especially bookmarklets—to my various machines. Also, the prospect of having to do it in multiple places has made me very reluctant to edit my bookmarks file(s) into more manageable form, a process I’m now looking forward to.

Foxmarks also offers a hosted service (that’s their main offering, in fact), so you don’t have to have your own server in order to take advantage of the extension.

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