Links
It is almost inevitable that once you have spent hours writing your small program that you can't noticing all the other people who have done, are doing or later did the same thing. I have found lots of programs and scripts that do the similar things with bookmarks to my program (many on sourceforge). I have no idea how well these others merge bookmark files. My program is very careful not lose any of the metadata in the bookmark.html file but tags and annotations are only stored in the more recent json file.
Many of these programs are also intended for keeping bookmarks synchronised across multiple browsers or multiple computers. As a tip, before you start playing around with these, remember to backup your bookmarks on each computer in case something goes wrong! A very useful piece of software for backing up your firefox profile is Mozbackup. There is also the firefox add-on FEBE.
So in the event that my program doesn't work for you, here are some links.
- Linkman - A complete bookmark manager.
- http://bookmark-merge.sourceforge.net/ - A perl script for merging bookmark files.
- http://bookmarkcompare.sourceforge.net/ - a visual merge utility
- http://bmsync.sourceforge.net/
- http://bookmarkbridge.sourceforge.net/
- http://sourceforge.net/projects/bkm/ - a vb and later a python project
- http://sourceforge.net/projects/pybookmark/ - another python project
- http://sourceforge.net/projects/xbelsync/
- http://sourceforge.net/projects/cfpybmkconv/ - bookmarks convertor
- http://sourceforge.net/projects/jbookmarks/
- http://sourceforge.net/projects/favoriteorg/
- http://sourceforge.net/projects/booksync/ - a linux program
- http://freshmeat.net/projects/bmsync/ - a linux program
- http://merge.sourceforge.net/ - a perl script
- http://pbstool.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
- http://www.abdn.ac.uk/tools/ibmpc/columbin/ - Columbine Bookmark Merge
- http://www.magnusbrading.com/bmc/ - The Bookmark Convertor
- http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/BookmarkMerger.aspx
- http://www.zaonce.com/stuff/tools.shtml - a perl script for safari users.
- Bookmark duplicate detector - a firefox add-on.
- Bookmacster - for MacOS
Some of the programs above can synchronise multiple computers if you have access to an FTP server (or dropbox?). There are also some online services that are aimed at keeping your bookmarks synced across computers (although some of these can also use a private server if you have concerns about privacy).
- firefox sync - Mozilla's own syncing solution.
- xmarks - syncs across multiple browsers and computers (used to be foxmarks). Firefox addon
- syncplaces - firefox add-on
- zinkmo
- bookmark-sync-and-sort/ - firefox add-on
- chipmark - firefox add-on
These social bookmarking sites are maybe getting away from the point of this page but...
- Scuttle - open source social bookmarking
- Bookmarker - the universal sidebar for social bookmarking networks
- Addthis - adds bookmarks to social bookmarking sites
- Delicious - the social bookmarking site
These are useful but I'm really getting off track now
- read-it-later - firefox add-on. Stores a list of sites to read later (which can be synced across computers)
- Session-manager - firefox add-on. Save and manage firefox sessions
Some useful technologies are XBEL which is a bookmark exchange language and JSON which is the current format that firefox uses for bookmarks.
Finally, here is my blog post on the firefox bookmarks.html merger which also discusses some of the avenues that I looked into: http://thefreakazoid.blogspot.com/2009/01/firefox-bookmarkhtml.html