noirExtreme

For years I have been using BookmarkSync to keep my bookmarks in the office and at home up to date. BookmarkSync is a small system tray application that connects to a remote server and uploads/downloads bookmarks from any Windows / Internet Explorer system. It is the only web service for which I ever paid (OK, only $10 but still...).

In the meantime their server crashed, the software became open source and free BookmarkSync servers appeared on the web. Great.

But in the meantime I started moving slowly away from all things Microsoft and adopted Opera as a browser and Linux as operating system at home. Keeping bookmarks in sync became suddenly a lot more complex.

I searched for a solution but I could not find the perfect match. Currently I use bookmarkbridge to keep Opera bookmarks and Explorer Favorites in sync on the same PC and BookmarkSync to sync Explorer Favorites on remote Windows PCs. While this setup works reasonably well it is far from perfect. The most annoying problem is that I still can't sync Linux and Windows PCs. In the end I decided to try and write this tool myself.

Favoritism
Features

• Sync Explorer Favorites, Opera, Mozilla and Netscape bookmarks (+more exotic browsers later: Konqueror, Galeon, Lynx) on one or many PCs running Windows or Linux.
• Upload to del.icio.us straight from "manage Favorites/Bookmarks" window in browser
• Add any del.icio.us RSS feeds to Favorites/Bookmarks as separate folder

Implementation

• based on wxWidgets for portabilty
• Using any IMAP4 mailbox as repository for remote synchronisation

This deserves an explanation. The problem with BookmarkSync is that the day the guy who is running the Bookmarksync server that I use decides to stop the service I am stuck (well, it is not really a problem for me as I have a server connected to the web where I could run the service if needed but for most people it is an issue). Something a lot of people have though is access to an IMAP mailbox. Even if they recommend POP3 in most cases, a lot of ISPs offer IMAP4 as an alternative to let users access mail on their server. There are also free mail providers on the web that offer IMAP4. The goodness of IMAP4 is that --unlike POP3-- this protocol allows not only to fetch messages from a mailbox but also to store them. So this software will allow users to keep an up-to-date version of their bookmarks in a subfolder of their mailbox.

• command line interface to allow scheduled synchronisation with cron (Linux) or with "scheduled tasks" (Windows).
• GUI for configuration and selection of what folders to synchronise.

Progress

• IMAP4 library 70% done

I decided to write everything from scratch as I view this as an opportunity to learn. I will definitely release binaries for free and enventually source code as open source.

Ref: BookmarkSync
Ref: Opera browser