Tuesday December 14, 2004

A Delicious Firefox Headache.

Image: Firefox Logo

I have been migrating my bookmarks to del.icio.us over the past week or so, marveling at the level of organization that can be achieved with the use of tags. It’s been great. I’ve been doing all this with the hopes that I can easily synchronize my bookmarks between many computers via Firefox’s Live Bookmarks feature.

For a while, it worked like a charm. And then I hit a snag. A big snag. Maybe you can help.

I read a lot. So it wasn’t long until I had created nearly 50 bookmarks tagged blogosphere. Opening Firefox 1.0, I go to del.icio.us, subscribe to the proper feed by clicking the Live Bookmark icon at the bottom right corner of the browser, and add the feed to my bookmarks.

Whoops. Only the first 30 bookmarks show up in the Live Bookmark and, as of yet, I haven’t found a way to increase that number. Sure, I could divide my del.icio.us blogosphere bookmarks into smaller subcategories, but sooner or later even the subcategories will exceed 30 bookmarks.

So what can be done? Has anyone out there come up with a solution? The del.icio.us/Firefox Live Bookmark combo seems pretty handicapped at the moment.

Commentary

Jon Hicks » 4992 days ago #

Have you tried foxylicious for adding your delicious bookmarks to your own firefox bookmarks? Or is that going back to where you were before? There’s also the delicious firefox extension, which shows all the bookmarks in the sidebar

Jon Hicks » 4992 days ago #

Sorry, forgot the links: foxylicious and delicious extension

Jon Hicks » 4992 days ago #

Sorry one more. I can’t recommend enough the Bookmarks Sync extension for keeping your bookmarks the same on all the computers you use.

Jared » 4992 days ago #

Thank you, Jon! The foxylicious extension is more in line with what I was hoping the Live Bookmarks would do, but didn’t. I’m getting all my del.icio.us bookmarks now.

I installed the Bookmarks Sync extension once and everything seemed to work fine, except I never could find the /xbel.xml file at the location it was supposed to reside at. I’ll have to look into that again, since it seemed like the perfect solution fom my needs.

I still think it’s too bad that the Live Bookmarks cut off at 30 items. I’m not sure if that’s a Firefox issue or a del.icio.us issue, but it seems kind of limiting.

Jon Hicks » 4991 days ago #

Jared – I’m pretty sure its a restriction in the rss feed itself. Like most feeds, it only shows the last x number of entries.

With the xbel.xml file, did you upload it to the server first? If there isn’t one there it should create it when you ask it to upload. Having said that, I think I just created a blank text file with the name xbel.xml, and then it all worked fine.

Mark Steinruck » 4984 days ago #

Jared,
Thanks for posting this little problem. I had the exact same problem until I saw Jon’s solution with foxylicious. This technology stuff is amazin’!

Ryan » 4976 days ago #

That bookmark sync extension is crap and the developers lack of support makes it worse. It doesn’t work for me at all and the preference window is buggy, just awful.

Jared » 4975 days ago #

That bookmark sync extension is crap and the developers lack of support makes it worse. It doesn’t work for me at all and the preference window is buggy, just awful.

Yes, that extension definitely has some issues. I recently discovered why it never worked for me: even when a specific location was entered for the xbel.xml file, the extension uploaded it to my /home/ directory. I’m using Foxylicious instead, although I hate to think what I’d do if de.licio.us ever lost my data.

Hell hath no fury like a designer who loses his bookmarks.

Eric Goodwin » 4897 days ago #

Just found this. I will upload all your bookmarks from firefox to delicious. It takes a while, but does the job.

http://www.julian-bez.de/delicious/

ArcoJedi » 4631 days ago #

I ran into the same problem and found that this has more to do with the fact that Firefox’s Live Bookmarks feature is the limit and will only show you the most recent bookmarks and does not continue to ‘aggregate’ them. I think the logic is that if you are reading/browsing a feed you will move or manually bookmark a single page for permanent solution. This wouldn’t work for me. I wanted them all.

Luckily I had installed Thunderbird at the same time as Firefox and although not wowed by their support for email (satisfied but not wowed), the software does collect and permanently save RSS feeds of any and all kinds.

I hope that helps.

ArcoJedi » 4631 days ago #

I meant to say, but forgot, that I also use foxylicious and haven’t noted any issues. Sorry.

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