Maintaining your own bookmark server.
Ever since Firefox 3 came out and google browser sync was no longer supported, I’ve been looking for a replacement to keep my computers in-sync with each other. The first maintainable sync program I found was Weave. It currently has a little lacking in support across platforms and is in highly beta mode. This will become my bookmark program when it becomes more stable.
As for my current bookmark program I just changed to foxmarks. It supports encryption, your own server and seems fast and stable. I’d like to take the rest of the blog to show you how to set up your own bookmark WebDAV server on Dreamhost, and then generalize it.
The first things I did was create a new subdomain, but this isn’t needed since WebDAV at DreamHost needs a folder to be turned on. I would choose a folder 2 deep as in / + user/ or if you are using your main website use jasonsidabras.com/bookmark/user/. The reason for this is WebDAV on DreamHost makes the folder and anything else under the folder owned by dhapache. And you need to create an .htaccess file in the parent directory and turn mod_rewrite off.
This is simple, open up .htaccess, in this case in the “bookmark” folder and type:
Make yourself a user and password that you are going to use for your bookmarks and use that for the login in the WebDAV folder.
Finally, in the Dreamhost admin set up an .htpassword file in the user directory. This will make sure people can’t get to your private keys if you use weave, or unencrypted files from foxmarks.
Server side, that is it.
Just go into your weave or foxmarks and set up the username and password you used for your server. With weave its easy, just point the server to http://domain.com/path/to/user/. The only difference with foxmarks is you have to specify the file to save your bookmarks in: http://domain.com/path/to/user/foxmarks.json.
That’s it!
If you have your own server you can follow these instructions to set up your apache with WebDAV.
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November 22nd, 2008 at 6:02 pm
Pretty cool, I’ll have to set this up myself at some point. Have you played password storage at all yet?
November 22nd, 2008 at 7:44 pm
Haven’t tried password storage only because I’ve been so trained into using Password Gorilla or PasswordMaker that having firefox remember passwords goes against my intuition.