ZenLinux Blog

For years now I’ve maintained my own rsync-based shell scripts to “synchronize” my web browser bookmarks and email client address book between the various computers I use at home and at work. The scripts didn’t actually synchronize changes – they were more of a way of pushing or pulling changes, and I’ve developed a diligence in keeping track of what’s most up to date to avoid clobbering the data I want to keep.

Recently I started using the Foxmarks Firefox extension for managing my bookmarks, and it has worked flawlessly. This free plugin does true synchronization – meaning I can add or delete bookmarks at will on any machine at any time and distribute my changes without losing any data. This kind of bookmark sync service has been around for a while, but Foxmarks allows me to store my data on my own server – a key feature I had been waiting for for some time. All I needed to do was add WebDAV support to my Apache setup. It even works with https and authentication.

So checkout Foxmarks if you need to keep your Firefox bookmarks synchronized. I believe it also supports sync’ing password data too, but I’m too much of a security geek to keep passwords stored in my browser.