Puh, there are hundreds and hundreds of methods to store links for further reference The most common is creating a bookmark in the browser. Others include posting them on “social bookmarkers” such as del.icio.us or Furl (no link here because furl sucks) or stumbleupon.

Okay, but:

• Furl sucks
• del.icio.us may be nice but the more people think so the slower it becomes.
• StumbleUpon doesn’t sort entries in any way

There are also lots of plugins (for real browsers at least) to support the user with posting bookmarks to those social places:

• Delicious makes posting quite easy, but doesn’t speed up the process; retrieval is not possible
• Foxylicious doesn’t work for me at all - hints welcome
• stumbleupon makes posting easy, however retrieval is still complex an un-sorted

and still, none of the above (or any other I have seen)

• allows to access the links in a user-friendly manner similar to the normal bookmarks in the browser.
• allows to sync browser bookmarks with posted entries
• can post all browser bookmarks at once
• allows private bookmarks which other people may not see
• … is really useful

What I want:

• common bookmarks for all places where I use a browser (at work, at home, at different computers)
• location-specific bookmarks - for example at work I have some sites from the intranet which I cannot acces from anywhere else and thus don’t need anywhere else, and at home I have sopme bookmarks to local copies of docs+specs
• private bookmarks that I don’t want anybody else to see: I don’t mind anybody knowing that I bookmark java.sun.com but with www.playgirl.com it’s different.
• convenient user interface (preferably via browser toolbar/personal toolbar folder)
• seamless integration with the browser, no extra scripts to run etc.

Problems:

• Once I decide that I have a problem with sorting/ordering/cleaning up something, I cannot work concentrated on something (else) that requires the first something because I keep thinking I should clean up first -> currently I cannot bookmark any pages because whenever I need to bookmark something I want to make sure all my bookmark sources are in sync and all tags/descriptions accurate and after I’ve done that I forgot why I bookmarked the page in the first place…
• Mozilla stores its bookmarks in a very inconvenient way, as an html file, which is not well-formed XML and thus not easy to parse, and which contains display information rather than semantic information on the bookmarks
• Writing a plugin for Mozilla is everything but easy (see Mozillazine), there’s no (good) documentation that I know of, and it requires knowledge about lots of additional technologies I know nothing about (xul, javascript,…)
• (even if there was some) I hate reading manuals and technical documentation

Stepstones:

• Python script to submit all mozilla bookmarks to delicious can read mozilla html bookmark file and submits all entries to del.icio.us, using foldder names as tags (every bookmark gets the tag “Personal Toolbar Foldder”). Takes 10 seconds for one submit, to prevent being throttled by del.icio.us
• Java API for Delicious I used this to read all bookmarks from my del.icio.us account (no, I haven’t deleted it yet)
• Bookmarks Synchronizer Extension for Firefox has problems with my webdav account; reports an error but doesn’t say what the problem is.
• example mozilla extension there’s little documentation on how to write an extension but this provides a minimum example from which to start
• The XML Bookmark Exchange Language Resource Page

now let’s see what this looks like. more to come.