bookmark managers

I’ve decided I really really need a bookmark manager.

Regularly now I use three computers and five profiles and I need to coordinate bookmarks between them. And I don’t. I have a vague notion of a master bookmark file on one computer which I kind of try to keep as the master but its all hackish and informal — I actually regularly email bookmarks to myself — and mostly its a mess.

My original plan had been that once I was done with the current contract I’m working on I was going to take some free time and write myself a bookmark manager as a rich client. I was going to do it in Java, with the theory that I also could use that opportunity to learn Swing better (don’t ask me how it would plug into browsers, I hadn’t thought that far ahead). My bookmark manager would sync to a server using one of the open source bookmark syncing protocols.

But now there are a bunch of web-based bookmark managers that seem to be becoming increasingly popular, such as del.icio.us and hyperlinkomatic. I should probably check those out first before I spend a lot of time reprogramming the wheel. I’m not so sure about the idea of storing my bookmarks on somebody else’s server that I may or may not trust, but then I’ve been experimenting with Gmail, too, and it doesn’t bother me so much to store my email on somebody else’s server so I’m not quite sure what my problem is.

The big thing about del.icio.us seems to be the community aspect, that your bookmarks are published and shared amongst other users of the link community. That’s an interesting concept and worth exploring, but that goal of sharing my links is far down the list for me. Link management and organization across computers is what I really need.

Hyperlinkomatic seems to be a little more of a pure link manager and less about the sharing. But I’m not so sure that its organization features are as advanced as I need either.

At any rate, I’ll be trying both of them to see if they’ll do. Otherwise, I guess I’ll be brushing up on my Swing after all. And if you, dear reader, know of any similar tools I can check out, please send me mail at lemay@lne.com (or gmail: I’m llemay there but I won’t post a link cause that address miraculously hasn’t been hit by spam yet).