Software + Oxygen

As always, researchers and casual web users alike need persistent, searchable, well-organized and well-protected bookmarks. You can’t count on search engines alone to find important items on the web, especially if they are behind firewalls and not indexed by your search engine. And so I’m constantly on the lookout for bookmarking systems that are better than the previous ones. My latest preference is Sitebar+Firefox.

Sitebar provides both the software (which is open source and freely available) and the services to synchronize your bookmarks between all your scattered computers and a central site. The services are optional, but if you’re as lazy as I am, you can pay them about $1.30/month to store and synchronize unlimited numbers of bookmarks. They integrate seamlessly and nearly invisibly into the Firefox browser’s bookmarking system, which in turn store bookmarks locally as an html file, making backup a simple matter.

If you don’t want to store your bookmarks on a server that you don’t completely control, you can even run the Sitebar server yourself; it’s open source.

This is the best system I’ve found, to date. The import and export works very well; the browser can be configured to keep you loosely synchronized (download from the server upon startup, upload upon exit, and upload or download on demand); and it is unobtrusive.

The thing is, though, that Sitebar has a very poor website, and it requires some real study to figure out exactly what you need in order to get up and running. Here’s the shortcuts:

1. Get the Firefox browser, as it can be extended in ways that Sitebar takes advantage of. In my fairly objective view (until last month, I had been an Internet Explorer user forever), it seems to be easier to use and arguably more secure than IE, as well.
2. Sign up for sitebar service, OR set up your own server.
3. Import your bookmarks
4. Follow Sitebar’s instructions on downloading and integrating their software into Firefox.
5. Now here is the surprising part: some of the software you need is actually called “server software” on Sitebar’s site. On the “server software page is an icon that links you to the bookmark synchronizer that you need. You won’t easily find this synchronizer anywhere else. Here is the link, for convenience: http://sitebar.org/xpi/BookmarksSynchronizer.xpi

Enjoy!

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This entry was posted on Sunday, August 13th, 2006 at 12:40 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.