git ssb

title: "Live Bookmarks" date: 2004-09-17 00:57 status: published description: > How to swap bookmarks with your friends, with help from a Firefox

tags: Firefox

links:

• url: http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/live-bookmarks.html
  title: "Live Bookmarks (Mozilla)" rel: related type: text/html
• url: http://www.getfirefox.com/
  title: "Get Firefox" description: "The best browser - bar none" rel: related type: text/html

<p>
<a href="http://www.getfirefox.com/">Firefox 0.10</a> is out, the first release to feature <a href="http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/live-bookmarks.html" title="Live Bookmarks (Mozilla)">live bookmarks</a>. Live bookmarks are essentially bookmarked <abbr title="Rich Site Summary">RSS</abbr> feeds, usually used to monitor news sites and weblogs without having to bother to visit them. </p>
<p>
This entry isn't about how cool live bookmarks are - it's about making your own. Live bookmarks can be used as a list of actual bookmarks, which you (yes, you) can share with your friends, enemies and other humans. You can effectively say to your friends “here, you run this folder”. </p>
<p>
As live bookmarks are just RSS (or Atom) feeds, anyone who knows how to make them will be laughing (proverbially); the following instructions are aimed at everyone else, and assume you are totally clueless. There are various formats available, but the easiest for our purpose is RSS 2.0. </p>
<p id="h-instructions">
Firstly, open up your favourite plain-text editor; Notepad is more than adequate. Don't use a word processor or anything that can visually style text - they add extra, error-causing information to the file. </p>
<p>
Secondly, copy the following and paste it into your text editor: </p>
<pre><code> &lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="us-ascii"?> <rss version="2.0"> <channel> <title><var>Grey's live bookmarks</var>&lt;/title> <description><var>Some links</var>&lt;/description> <link><var>http://purl.org/mooquackwooftweetmeow/</var>&lt;/link> <language><var>en</var>&lt;/language> <item> <link><var>http://www.getfirefox.com</var>&lt;/link> <title><var>Firefox</var>&lt;/title> </item> <item> <link><var>http://www.getthunderbird.com</var>&lt;/link> <title><var>Thunderbird</var>&lt;/title> </item> </channel> </rss> </code></pre>
<p>
Everything down to <code>&lt;channel></code> can be safely disregarded - it just identifies the file as an RSS 2.0 channel (you don't even need to know what <em>this</em> means). </p>
<p>
The next block gives general information about the feed; the bits you should alter are shown thusly: <var>change me</var>. The tags - <code>&lt;title></code>, <code>&lt;/title></code> and friends - should be fairly self-descriptive. </p>
<p>
The feed's title and description can be anything - they're intended for human consumption, so they might as well be descriptive. </p>
<p>
The link for the feed should be to a web page, such as your homepage; note that it's not a link to the feed itself. If you don't have a homepage, you can just point it anywhere - Firefox doesn't yet use this information (but it's required by the RSS specification). </p>
<p>
The language should be <code>en</code> - English. If you like, you can be more specific, for example <code>en-GB</code> is British English, <code>en-US</code> is American English, <code>en-CA</code> is Canadian English and <code>en-AU</code> is Australian English. </p>
<p>
The next two blocks are bookmarks; each consists of a link to the page and a title to be displayed. You can have as many of these blocks as you want - just copy and paste the ones there. </p>
<p>
Note that links must be full <acronym title="Uniform Resource Locator">URL</acronym>s - web addresses should include <code>http://</code> at the start. Throughout the file, ampersands (&) <em>must</em> be written as <code>&amp;amp;</code> for reasons you don't care about. <em>(This includes in long URLs you copy and paste in!)</em> Also, steer clear of <code>&lt;</code> and <code>&gt;</code>. Otherwise, Firefox will fail to load the live bookmark. </p>
<p>
The last block of text finishes the file - leave it as is. </p>
<p>
Save the file; its name should end with <code>.xml</code>, for example <code>livebookmarks.xml</code>. </p>
<p>
You can now upload it to a web host - any web host will do, even <em>(shudder)</em> GeoCities; I recommend <a href="http://www.freewebs.com/">FreeWebs</a> for small web-hosting jobs. Note the file's web address - probably something like <samp>http://www.freewebs.com/yourusername/livebookmarks.xml</samp>. </p>
<p>
To add the live bookmark to Firefox, open the Bookmark Manager (Bookmarks &gt; Manage Bookmarks) and choose File &gt; New Live Bookmark. Give the feed's location and choose a name to display, <span lang="fr">et voilà</span>! </p>
<p>
Of course, you can edit the file as often as you want to change your live bookmarks; your friends will see the changes pretty much straight away. </p>
<p>
Start swapping bookmarks with your friends - it's good craic. </p>