TronProg: Programming and Computers

I've always taken care of synchronizing my bookmarks (and also other personal data, such as email, etc.) with a central repository, since I'm using several computers and laptops and I want to able to access them anywhere. Lately, I had been using the firefox bookmark synchronizer extension, which relies on a HTTP or FTP server. This had also the advantage to make the bookmarks publicly available. The HTTP server, where the main bookmark copy was stored, crashed, and I did not feel to reinstall all the webdav stuff just for my bookmarks. Moreover, I had heard of new free services for storing bookmarks. I must admit I did not perform a deep research and I only ended up with two names to try: Foxmark and Del.icio.us.

The latter is surely more than a bookmark synchronizer: it's oriented to share your bookmarks with other people and to tag them with as many tags as you see fit; social networking.

Foxmark is "just" a bookmark synchronizer... but it does its work really well! The foxmark site offers the space to store the main bookmarks replica (though you might use your own server). The synchronization works pretty well and it does not seem to require a lots of bandwidth (I've also tried it with a slow modem connection and it does seem to work fine). Moreover, the synchronization takes place in background and it is performed when required (e.g., you change your bookmarks; well, the synchronization policy is smarter, and you can read more about that at the foxmark site). If you exit Firefox and your bookmarks were not synchronized, you will be warned about that, and you'll have the chance to perform synchronization. Finally, your bookmarks are still your bookmarks (you still have the bookmarks.html file). Unfortunately, for the moment, the bookmarks cannot be made public... hopefully this feature will be added some day.

Del.icio.us... well... the first impression was not good... all the bookmarks are twisted in a flat manner, no hierarchies anymore... only tags... probably I still haven't got used to tags, but I prefer the tree structure. I was also willing to try it for some time, but when I then tried to export the bookmarks from del.icio.us I realized that the tree structure was lost forever... argh... no way... for the moment I'll stay with foxmarks.

But I'll try to get a little bit more into social networking and del.icio.us :-)

Pubblicato da betto a 2:50 PM 2 commenti

Etichette: firefox, foxmarks

The update of Iceweasel (the Debian version of Firefox), version 2.0.0.1+dfsg-3 seems to be very unfortunate.

First of all, after the update, when running the new version, the import profile wizard came out and after this, a brand new profile of iceweasel came out, just like I'd lost my previous profile.


Fortunately, my previous firefox (or iceweasel) profile was not lost... simply, a new directory (called, indeed, iceweasel) was created under the .mozilla directory.

So, I only had to remove the new iceweasel directory and make a symbolic link, with the same name, to my previous firefox directory.


Some problems, however, still existed: when clicking on an URL from within Thunderbird (well... yes, OK, Icedove in Debian), if a running instance of iceweasel was present, the present error came out:

Iceweasel is already running, but it is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Iceweasel process, or restart your system.

Fortunately, the solution is illustrated in this bug report, and simply consists of changing this line in the file /usr/lib/iceweasel/iceweasel:

APPLICATION_ID=iceweasel

instead of

APPLICATION_ID=firefox

And then, everything worked as it used to do before...

Pubblicato da betto a 9:57 AM 6 commenti

Etichette: debian, firefox, iceweasel

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