[tech] A question for bookmark service power users? (original) (raw)
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Sat, Nov. 19th, 2011, 11:45 am
[tech] A question for bookmark service power users?
There's lots of information out there about different hosted bookmarking sites, but there's one thing in particular I can't figure out from the outside, and I'd really rather not try to solve this one by brute force. I'm hoping there's someone really familiar with bookmark apps who can just tell me based on the following desiderata, "Oh, what you want to do is..."
Are any of these sites (Delicious, Pinboard, Diigo, etc) good at coping with multiple accounts?
Here's the rather complicated problem I'm trying to solve:
(1) I want a tool I can use at home to capture bookmarks that will be useful at work, and therefore which I will use from my copy of Firefox at the office. From the point of view of my FF browsing experience in the office, that needs to be an absolutely independent corpus of bookmarks from any other bookmarks I want to store. If someone accesses my computer at work, such as the office de facto sysadmin, and I'm logged in to that account, all they should see are my professional bookmarks.
(2) But I also would like a powerful bookmark manager that I can use for my own bookmarks, so I can access them from all my various browsers and computers at home and on the road. Webpage caching is something I'd like and am potentially willing to pay for; I want this more for my personal corpus than my professional one.
(3) I'll need to have both services installed in the same browsers at home.
(4) Having to stop and figure which account I'm logged into before bookmarking something, to make sure I'm not accidentally booking something NSFW to my work bookmarks is absolutely unacceptable. I am going to need to be logged into both accounts at the same time, and to have different invocations (whether keystrokes or JS bookmarklets) to bookmark a page to each of those service.
I understand this may mean I need to use two different services. But are there any bookmark services which could handle this scenario themselves? (Surely I'm not the only person with the problem?)
And if I do need to use two different services, suggestions for which I should use for each?
PS: (5) Not interested in social aspects, so any service where the social can't be turned off on the account level (e.g. defaulting all new bookmarks to private) isn't for me.
Sat, Nov. 19th, 2011 06:13 pm (UTC)
I've wanted this before and couldn't make it work other than by running two browser instances, where if I ran into something in the personal browser I thought I would be work-relevant I'd need to copy & paste over to the other browser. It's not so bad, but if you encounter something better, I'd sure like to hear about it.
Currently I'm using two Google Sites wiki-like objects for my internet curation, on the theory that anything that is important enough to bookmark (or keep around in my ever-growing pile of open tabs) is important enough to take a moment to write about and put in context on a page. This works well enough at getting rid of tabs and storing links, but I haven't been doing it long enough to judge whether it's write-only.
Sat, Nov. 19th, 2011 06:21 pm (UTC)
Hrm, that's good to know.
One work-around I'm considering (as if I didn't have enough to implement) is using my website as a proxy, by coding up a dynamic page with login (.htaccess style) that catches the URL (sent via custom bookmarklet) and prompts me which service I want to save it to; it then handles the transmission to the appropriate account, in it's own time. That assumes reasonably easy programmatic interfaces to any of the target services.
Pinboard.in would seem to win big time on that score: they use post-via-secret-email-address, which I expect would be trivial to harness. (Not sure; haven't ever had a website at this hosting company try to send an email...)
But, of course, I'd really like not have to write all this.
Edited at 2011-11-19 06:23 pm (UTC)
Sat, Nov. 19th, 2011 09:38 pm (UTC)
That's what I do too. At work, Opera for personal, FF for work. If I need a URL for work and am at home I can always email/IM my work account with the address (the opposite direction is very uncommon for me).
Another option, although much more painful, might be a flash drive with portable apps for whatever browsers you need in both places -- and a truecrypt partition for the personal stuff (again for whichever browsers but it'd use different cached login credentials). It is not a particularly good solution though since you would need to close down the browsers before removing the drive, and that's no fun. It would also mean carrying around another drive. Nah. Bad solution.
Sun, Nov. 20th, 2011 07:16 am (UTC)
Not a powe-ruser, but doing my own research lately...
Delicious currently has no support for multiple accounts (I only really started using the service after the September switchover, so I can't speak to how it used to work). The Firefox addons have no account info and the bookmarklets just send a URL - if you're not logged in then you need to login first before bookmarking will occur.
Pinboard seems pretty nifty, and quite probably would work well for your personal bookmarks. I haven't used it myself, but the letter the creator wrote after the fanfiction invasion won me over.
Honestly though, you might save yourself a lot of hassle if you just use two different services. If anything two different visual styles will help to prevent you from bookmarking the wrong link to the wrong service.
Incidentally, while looking for something else I found this post on G+ which introduced me to If This Then That. You might be able to make use of it to get what you want if you're determined to make use of only one service.
Sun, Nov. 20th, 2011 08:12 am (UTC)
Thanks for the pointers, and the reminder of ittt, which I kept meaning to get a round tuit to check out. And that letter is amazingly cool.
Sun, Nov. 20th, 2011 11:35 pm (UTC)
I don't use a bookmarking service per se. Instead, I have two complementary setups.
For bookmarks I want readily available I use XMarks, a cross-browser bookmark sync facility. You can subscribe different browsers to different subsets of bookmarks, which solves the problem of work vs. personal bookmarks nicely. (ETA: XMarks does have some social/sharing stuff out there, but as a bookmark sync service it is de facto private by default.)
In a more general sense, I've been using Springpad of late. You can store bookmarks, notes, references to various other things (movies, music, etc.) and various kinds of lists; there is a (still evolving) social component, which I haven't done much with. You can specify whether things should be shared or private by default, based on what notebook(s) you put them in, or in the account settings globally by type. For this, you would probably have one or more notebooks specific to work-related stuff. There's a bookmarklet to add stuff from a browser, plus mobile apps that can add via browser, voice or photo/video search, barcode, etc.
Edited at 2011-11-20 11:44 pm (UTC)
Mon, Nov. 21st, 2011 03:05 am (UTC)
Keen! Thanks for the pointers.