Adventures in Bookmarking
Until recently, I had been using Ma.gnolia for my bookmarks. Then they experienced massive data corruption and data loss. this forced me to re-evaluate, and found Foxmarks via a recommendation on Twitter. I really like Foxmarks. Here a little background on what brought me to it.
In the early days, I started out like everyone else, using the Firefox‘s built in bookmarks. That was in the Firefox 1.x series. It did the job, but when I was on a different machine I had a different set of bookmarks that I had to manage. It’s easy enough when the set of bookmarks is small, but that gets out of control when your set of bookmarks gets significantly larger. If only there was a way to synchronize.
I searched the Firefox Extensions and eventually found Bookmarks Synchronizer. This was a great step forward. I now could have one set of bookmarks. There were 2 limitation though. First, the authoritative copy was on the local machine, as that had the most recent edits. Secondly, I had to manually tell it to synch. so I if forgot for a while, it was possible to overwrite newer bookmarks with older bookmarks. I didn’t want to have to manage that. I needed something that had a centralized place where all the bookmarks were kept and then sent to each local machine.
Enter del.icio.us, the social bookmarking service with an odd URL. Del.icio.us got around the synch issue by always writing to the server instead of the local machine. This was done using either a bookmarklet, or their toolbar. Then the local browser would download updates from the server. One point of authority, with multiple points of distribution. I was happy for a long time with this solution. It was very easy to add new bookmarks to my collection. I also made use of a feature called ‘bundles’ which allowed me to associate multiple tags together, and then I added these bundles to my toolbar. This was awesome as it allowed me to use the delicious bookmarks like the native Firefox bookmark toolbar. The downside of delicious was that they never had a good solution to editing bookmarks in bulk. If you wanted to delete 50 bookmarks, it took a long time. With each deletion taking 3-4 clicks, you’d perform approximatey 150-200 clicks. I had far more bookmarks to deal with, so I decided I’d start over – but where?
When I went to Gnomedex in 2008, I discovered Ma.gnolia. One thing I really liked about magnolia was their use of OpenID – many sites, one set of authentication credentials. Awesome! Note: If you’re creating a new service, use OpenID out of the gate. Another thing I liked was the UI is much cleaner and better organized that del.icio.us. So I’ll happily computed for a number of months until last friday. That’s when Ma.gnolia experienced massive data loss. As of today (Feb 5, 2009) They’re working hard on restoring their users data, but it’s looking less likely as time goes on. So now what?
A few days a friend of mine tweeted about Foxmarks, as Walt Mossberg from the Wall Street Journal had done a write up on Foxmarks and recommended it. It too uses a firefox extension, but it makes use of Firefoxes built-in bookmark system which, with Firefox 3, uses tags. So I’ve come full circle, but I still get all the features I want. Firefox allows you to make use of folders to organize and tags your information, so you get the best of both worlds. The way tags are used is awesome. In the location bar, start typing a tag name. Any items that match that tag will be listed in the drop down list that appears – regardless of what folder it’s in! I have a folder called ‘Google Apps’. In this, I have bookmarks to docs.google.com, calendar.google.com, gmail.com, www.google.com. That folder sits in my Bookmarks Toolbar. I love how easy it is for me to access these.