Maria’s Guides

I find the right bookmark synchronizer for FireFox.

One of the features I immediately missed when I switched from Safari to Firefox was bookmark synchronization. I use two different Macintoshes on a daily basis — my desktop Mac at the office and my little PowerBook — and it really bugged me that they didn’t have the same bookmarks.

But I quickly learned that Firefox supports extensions and add-ons. And I tracked down a plugin called Bookmark Synchronizer SE. I installed it on both Macs and soon had synchronization working on Firefox.

But BMSync SE had upload and download progress boxes that appeared each time it uploaded bookmarks to my server or downloaded bookmarks from my server. If I set it on Automatic upload/download, this dumb box appeared every time I closed all Firefox windows, quit Firefox, or opened a Firefox window. It was annoying. When I put it in manual mode, I had to remember to upload and download the bookmarks. This is more effort than I wanted to make.

Yesterday, after making some extensive changes to my bookmarks, I went looking for another solution. And I found it: Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer. This works like BMSync in that you must install it on each computer you want to synchronize. When you restart Firefox, a Foxmarks installation wizard appears. It guides you through the steps to set up an account on the foxcloud.com Web site where your bookmarks will be stored. Turn on automatic synchronization and you’re done.

What I like about Foxmarks is how effort-free it is. And although I’ve set up a foxcloud.com account, I could also set up Foxmarks to work with my own server to help enhance privacy. (Not that foxcloud.com doesn’t have security; I’m sure it does.)

I uninstalled BMSync this morning. And I’m really glad I don’t have to look at those silly download windows anymore.

My gravatar image finally appears on Gravatar-enabled sites — including this one.

If you’ve been following the gravatar topic, you know that I recently enabled this site’s comments for gravatars and then waited for mine to be approved.

This morning, I got an e-mail message saying that my gravatar had been rated and approved. Sure enough, when I checked the comments to my Trackback Troubleshooting post, my image was there.

Dr. Dave’s image also appeared this morning. It had been appearing as a black box, but today there’s a face. He may call himself the “Unknown Genius,” but his gravatar makes him look a bit like an evil genius.

I’ll be writing a how-to piece shortly — maybe even this morning — I woke up too darn early to do anything else — that explains how to create and register a gravatar. I’m hoping that the folks who don’t already have one and who participate by leaving comments in this and other blogs will take a few moments to get one. It’s kind of cool to see all the images on blogs with gravatars enabled.