Manage Live Bookmarks With Firefox
Firefox 1.0PR includes an excellent new feature called Live Bookmarks. What that means is that any web site that has an RSS feed can be bookmarked and the links will be kept up-to-date. This is really cool for getting the latest headlines from your favorite websites such as CNN or Slashdot.
I wanted to take this a step further. I surf the web from at least four different machines, and on each one I have to maintain a seperate list of bookmarks on Firefox. It’s getting hard to maintain since I visit a large variety of sites on a daily basis. This new RSS feature gives us an easy way to keep those bookmarks in a central place so you don’t have to type in all those URL’s a million times.
So what is RSS? It stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and was created as a means for sites to share links to specific articles, weblog posts, etc. For example you might see someone take the headlines and links from Slashdot and post them on their own site. I won’t get into it too much, but a basic history of RSS is available on XML.com.
Firefox takes the RSS feeds from a website, and stores them so that the latest headlines show up as bookmarks, making it super easy to keep updated on the latest stories. So why not create an RSS feed of all your bookmarks and store them for you?
In order to do that, you need to know the basics of the RSS standard. An RSS 2.0 file will look something like this:
<rss version=”2.0″ xmlns:dc=”http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/”>
<channel>
<title>Main Bookmarks</title>
<link>http://www.slaggle.com</link>
<description>Main Bookmarks</description>
<language>en-us</language>
<item>
<title>Google</title>
<link>http://www.google.com</link>
<description>The Best Search Engine Out there</description>
<dc:creator>Google</dc:creator>
<dc:date>2004-09-17</dc:date>
</item>
<item>
<title>Google Groups</title>
<link>http://www.google.com/grphp?hl=en&tab=wg&q=</link>
<description>The Best Search Engine Out there</description>
<dc:creator>Google</dc:creator>
<dc:date>2004-09-17</dc:date>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>
I saved this file on my webserver in a “bookmarks” directory as bookmarks.rss and created an “index.html” file in the same directory that references it with a special link tag:
<link rel="alternate" title="Main Bookmarks"
href="//slaggle.com/bookmarks/bookmarks.rss" type="application/rss+xml" />
You can see the results of it by visiting my bookmarks page. Go to View -> Page Source to view the source code. You can see that I set up five different categories of links. Main bookmarks, My Sites, Weblogs, Web Comics, and Forums.
Once I got all that set up, I created a new bookmark folder in Firefox called “Live Bookmarks” and then clicked on the RSS icon on the lower right-hand corner of the screen. It gave me a screen like this:
I clicked on each one individually and added them to the Live Bookmarks folder. Click here for see the final result.
Now whenever I want to add a new bookmark, I just add an “item” entry to one of the RSS files and I’ll be able to access the bookmark on any machine I work from. It’s very convenient if not a little awkward to set up (unless you’re a web/xml fiend like I am).
If you don’t want to go through the pain of setting this up yourself, you can sign up for services such as http://del.icio.us/ which will manage your bookmarks and set up the RSS feeds for you. All you have to do is subscribe through Firefox. It’s that easy!
I think if this gets too unmanageable for me I’ll create a PHP interface for managing the feeds automatically, but for now I’m pretty happy editing the RSS files directly especially since they don’t change that often.