pure roon

If like me you use several different computers in your daily life, you may, just like me again, have a lot of bookmarks for both work resources and just personal interests. I have my Windows XP box at work, Vista/Fedora 8 dual boot box at home and a Fedora 8 file server in my basement and maintaining bookmarks between 3 machines was too confusing to do all by myself.

I started looking round for tools that could help me, the first I came across from a friend’s recommendation was del.icio.us. I wasn’t really impressed, their homepage was confused and hard to follow. A few others came up including all the big names (Google, Yahoo etc) but there is one big problem…

I really don’t want to have to go to a website to find all my links to other websites. I have used the bookmarks in my trusty Firefox for years, built up quite a collection and spent hours ordering and sorting them so I really didn’t want to change.

It was well into last year when I discovered Foxmarks, just browsing through the multitude of Firefox addons, so I gave it a whirl and fell in love! I was able to keep my bookmarks exactly how I liked them, but make sure that the same bookmarks appeared on every computer I used. Conveniently if I am ever away from one of my synced computers I can just log onto their site and see all my links there instead.

Foxmarks has changed the way I use bookmarks. I used to just have links to all resources I need (being a web developer I have a lot of references I need to keep going back to) but now I can set up folders for bookmarks of news articles or blog posts that I want to read in the future. If I come accross something interesting at work that I want to blog about, I can just add it to my ‘To Blog’ folder. When I get home I will have a list of links that I wanted to blog about! All sorted!

Michael Arrington has written an excellent comparison of Foxmarks against Mahalo explaining the full features of Foxmarks in more detail.