Musings of a *IX guy

SiteBar online web based bookmark manager

In a previous post I explained how to install SiteBar on your own server. This post is my experiences of using SiteBar , if you don’t have a server to install SiteBar on, you can use the service provided by the authors of SiteBar. SiteBar is GPL open source.

Once you have signed up and logged in you are ready to go.

Although SiteBar works with any browser it looks and works best with a browser that can have a site displayed in a sidebar such as Firefox , Opera and  later versions of IE.

Setting up Firefox to display SiteBar in a sidebar

Go to the start link of your SiteBar web site , highlight the web address including the http:// part and then Edit – Copy.

Next select Bookmarks from the Firefox tool bar , then Organise Bookmarks. A new window appears, expand Bookmarks Menu and select the folder you want the SiteBar bookmark to go to.

Firefox Organise your bookmarks window

Select Organise – Add Bookmark from the toolbar. A new window appears as below. Fill in the Name , right click-  paste in the Location field so the web address of your Sitebar site you copied to the clipboard above inserts. Fill in the Keyword and Description fields. Click the box Load this bookmark in the sidebar , then click Add.

Firefox adding a bookmark in a sidebar

Close the organise bookmarks window. Now when you go to bookmarks and select the bookmark you created above a sidebar will be opened with the SiteBar in it.

Having Sitebar in a sidebar really makes SiteBar brilliant to use.

Firefox showing SiteBar bookmark manager in a sidebar

Sign into SiteBar. If you want to import your current bookmarks into SiteBar this is easy to do and it can handle various formats. First you have to export you browser bookmarks into a file. For Firefox go to Bookmark – Organise Bookmarks – Import and Backup – Export HTML , save the file and remember the filename and location.

For Internet Explorer follow the instructions here.

On your SiteBar menu right click on your user name just below public bookmarks and select Import Bookmarks

Import Bookmarks into SiteBar

The Import Bookmarks screen will display, use the Browse button to select the export file you saved above with your browsers bookmarks in it. The rest of the options can normally be left as default. Then click on Submit.

SiteBar Import Bookmarks screen

Once done , if you click on you username all of your imported bookmarks will display. You can delete bookmarks and folders by right clicking on the entry.

To go to a web site using a SiteBar bookmark just click on the bookmark and the website will appear in a new tab, the SiteBar sidebar will still be available.

SiteBar displaying a web page

Adding Bookmarks in SiteBar

To add a new folder just right click where you want the new folder to be and fill in the form to give it a name.

To add a link go to the web site in a browser tab . In SiteBar right click on the folder you want the bookmark to appear in and Add Link. Highlight the web address of the web site you want to bookmark in the browser tab and holding down the left mouse button drag the URL into the URL field in the SiteBar menu.

Next click on the Retrieve Link Information button – and here is the really nifty bit – SiteBar will go and get the link information from the web site you want to bookmark including the Favicon if available. What information it brings back is dependent on the target web site – some sites seem very good and SiteBar will even fill in the description field. Edit the fields as you wish and click Submit.

SiteBar adding a link

Searching your bookmarks

Type a keyword in the SiteBar dialogue box and then click on the backend bookmark icon

icon

This will display in a tab your SiteBar bookmarks matching the keyword in the top half of the screen ordered by how often you have clicked on them together with links from the SiteBar community and a Google search ( you can change your default search engine ) in the bottom half . See below as example of a search for the keyword news. It has picked up two bookmarks in my SiteBar – Freshmeat and BBC news.

There are lots of other features in SiteBar that I need to explore. I highly recommend SiteBar as a web based bookmark manager.

I have been using the Galeon web browser for many years. At the time I first started using it , it was one of the few browsers that was not bloated and just did web browsing.

Galeon is no longer being developed and I have been thinking about moving to Firefox for some time. Some sites have not displayed that well in Galeon and I have started to use Sitebar web based bookmark manager ( see my blog page here for details of how to install Sitebar on your own site ) which works best in a browser that can do a bookmark in a sidebar such as Firefox.

The main reason for my delay in moving to Firefox has been the lack on a clone tab function – I use this all the time in Galeon and miss this when I use Firefox. However in Firefox 3 I can now do a clone tab , all you need to do is hold down the control key and drag the tab to where you want the clone and it’s done.

I wanted to import all my Galeon bookmarks and saved passwords into Firefox. Although Firefox does not have a nice import wizard for Galeon settings it can be done quite easily.

Importing Galeon bookmarks into Firefox

Galeon bookmarks are in xbel format which Firefox cannot import directly  ( if you are using Sitebar you can import xbel format bookmarks into sitebar ) however Galeon can export it’s bookmarks in HTML format.

Start up Galeon , select Bookmarks form the tool bar – Edit Bookmarks , Bookmark – Export – Export to Mozilla

Hit Forward on the druid and the next page will show possible locations of your Mozilla bookmarks ( you don’t need Mozilla installed ) and asks you for a location to save the file. Do not use the location ( if any ) suggested but instead save the bookmarks to a file called bookmarks.html in your home directory.

Start up Firefox , select Bookmarks – Organise bookmarks

Select Import and Backup from the toolbar

Select Import HTML from the pull down menu

Select the bookmarks.html file you saved above and hit Open. The new bookmarks are merged into the existing Firefox bookmarks.

Importing Galeon saved passwords into Firefox

This assumes you do not have any saved passwords in Firefox already, if you have then make a note of what they are by going to Edit – Preferences – Security – Saved Passwords – Show Passwords

Find where your Galeon and Firefox profiles are :-

find ~ -name signons3.txt

This should pick up where your Firefox profile directory is , it will be something like ~/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxx.default   where xxxxxx is a string of random letters.

Quit out of Firefox and Galeon.

Go to the Galeon profile directory found above and copy the files key3.db and signons3.txt to your Firefox profile directory overwriting the existing files.

Start up Firefox and go to Edit – Preferences – Security – Saved Passwords – Show Passwords to check your passwords are now there.

Having used Firefox for a while I miss the Galeon feature where unread tags are a different colour. There is however a plugin to Firefox that amongst other things will colour unread tags – the plugin is Tab Mix Plus .It does far more than colour unread tags and is well worth looking at.