foxmarks
Latest
Xmarks calls it quits
I've been a big fan of Xmarks for a while now -- I work on a few Macs and PCs regularly, and while MobileMe is nice, I've always appreciated Xmarks' ease of use (after a one-time setup, it basically worked automatically) and compatibility across whatever browsers I happened to use. That's why I was disappointed to hear yesterday that they're calling it quits. Around 90 days from now, the servers will shut down, and Xmarks will be no more. Co-founder Todd Agulnick goes through the story of the service on that blog post. It was originally developed as Foxmarks, and it was designed to work directly with the Firefox browser to sync bookmarks there. Eventually, they brought in large numbers of users with tons of bookmarks in their browsers, but the company struggled to try and find a way to make money off of those numbers. Search became a main target, and if you're an Xmarks user, you'll know the 'tags" that would appear on Google Search pages in the browsers. But despite initial interest, that never took off, and after unsuccessfully finding a buyer for the company this past spring, Agulnick says the end has come. Fortunately, there are bookmark syncing alternatives, and most of the browsers these days have options built-in (which is why Xmarks won't move to a subscription service -- hard to sell something most browsers are offering for free). But I'll pour some out for Xmarks -- it was an excellent service. I'm just sorry it couldn't find a profitable place to settle down.
TUAW Tip: Sync your bookmarks to an iPhone or iPod touch with Xmarks
I'm an avid user of Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks) as are probably many of you. I browse the Internet regularly on three different computers, and so it helps immensely to have all of my Firefox bookmarks and passwords synced. But the one fly in my ointment has been my iPhone's mobile Safari installation -- because I don't usually use Safari as my browser, I haven't yet figured out a way to get all of my usual bookmarks on to the iPhone. Until now: this writeup by Shawn0 (via the good folks at Lifehacker) presents a quick workaround to get your Xmarks-synced bookmarks up and running on your iPhone. Unfortunately, he uses Internet Explorer to do it, but given that we're all on Macs, I discovered that it worked just fine with Safari. Set up Xmarks on your Safari installation, sync it up with your usual bookmarks, and then set iTunes to sync your mobile browser's bookmarks with Safari. The one big drawback is that you'll have to start up Safari every once in a while to make sure your changes get all the way out to the mobile device, but that's better than not having them synced up at all. And yes, you MobileMe users are laughing at us Xmarks users right now, because Apple's service syncs all of these things automatically. But I've never known Xmarks to go down, and this solution costs the low, low price of free per year. If, like me, you haven't landed on a solid way to sync bookmarks out to the mobile browser yet, here you go.
Foxmarks brings free bookmarks syncing to Safari
Foxmarks, the popular bookmark syncing service for Firefox, has now come to Safari. The service is designed to make it easy to keep your browser bookmarks synced when using different computers, by linking each browser to your own online repository. It was previously limited to Firefox, but the most recent version now includes support for Safari as well as Internet Explorer on Windows.While Safari users have previously been able to sync instances of Safari on different Macs with MobileMe, Foxmarks allows you to sync not just Safari on different Macs, but all three supported browsers (Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer) on both PCs and Macs. So, for instance, if you're one of those poor folks forced to use a PC at work, Foxmarks will keep your Firefox bookmarks there synced with your home Mac's copy of Safari.Unsurprisingly, Firefox is still the best supported of the three. For instance, password syncing is only supported on Firefox. And, as of yet, the Windows version of Safari is not supported. Nonetheless, if you want to get your bookmark sync on, the newest version of Foxmarks looks like a winner.The Foxmarks plugins are free downloads from Foxmarks; the Safari version is Leopard-only.[via jkOnTheRun]
Possible trick for syncing Firefox bookmarks via iDisk
In the grand quest for methods of syncing Firefox bookmarks between machines (a la .Mac syncing of Safari bookmarks), a friend of mine passed along a tip he found at a friend's blog. The tip involves creating a user.js file in your Firefox profile directory, then creating a Firefox folder in your iDisk/Documents directory. The tip is simple enough, but there's just one catch: I can't get it to work yet, so I thought I'd post it to see if any of you enterprising TUAW readers will have better luck.Playing with this tip inspired me to try a trick of my own which didn't seem to work either: placing Firefox's bookmarks.bak and bookmarks.html files in my iDisk, and then simply point at those files with aliases from within Firefox's profile directory. Again, no luck. While I don't necessarily mean to be posting tips that don't work, I thought these might be good ideas that could get us somewhere, without the need for installing extra software like Foxmarks. Although, to its credit, Foxmarks does get the job done fairly well; I'm just interested in the possibility of a .Mac Firefox bookmark syncing solution, devoid of extras or plugins.Anyone get something like this to work?
Synchronize Firefox bookmarks with Foxmarks
Remember that Bookmark Synchronizer extension for Firefox that synchronizes bookmarks between computers? Well it broke in Firefox 1.5, hurling me back into the Safari/Firefox dilemma as I really, really need that synchronizing goodness - I just have far too many bookmarks (over 1000 ) to keep track of between two Macs.Well Eureka! Foxmarks to the rescue! In fact, it brings a couple new tricks to the table besides allowing for basic FTP/HTTP bookmark synchronizing: if you don't have your own hosting space, they provide hosting for you (for free) to sync your bookmarks with. If that wasn't already nice enough, they also offer the .Mac-like ability to sign into your account and access your bookmarks from any computer through a web interface - allowing almost anywhere-in-the-world access to your bookmarks.While I just found this extension last night, their bookmark hosting service unfortunately suffered a power outage on Dec. 31st which, at the moment, means you can only use the extension to sync bookmarks with your own hosting service. Rest assured, they're working diligently to open the doors for hosted bookmark syncing, but if you're like me and you have your own space you'd like to use, I can verify this extension works like a charm. Sync away!
