Sharing the Best of the Web

I got an IM from Chris today

Chris: http://www.scribefire.com/
Chris: So far, so good.
Me: ??? What about Scribefire?
Chris: The blog editor. It’s a Firefox extension.
Chris: I might be out of the loop, but I just discovered it.
Me: Oh. LOL. I’ve been using it for about a year.

I was confused by his message at first. I couldn’t understand why he was mentioning something that I thought we had both been using for a while. Turns out that he had just found out about it, and was sharing it with me. It got me thinking about sharing interesting finds online, and I realized that it would be really nice to be able to create a Live Bookmark based off the bookmarks that people that share common interests with me. I remembered that Foxmarks had a sharing feature and I quickly went there to set that up, only to find that the order that they were in was not very useful. At first, I thought that the order was arbitrary and that the sorting would have to be done on the Foxmarks side, but after a little experimentation I learned that it was the internal order that Firefox uses (which you can not sort in a permanent way.

After some searching, I came up with a solution: SortPlaces. SortPlaces is a Firefox extension that will sort one or more bookmark folders based on just about all of the criteria that are stored in Firefox’s bookmarks database.  Of particular interest to me was the sort of date added.  By sorting in reverse order my (ironically) Unsorted Bookmarks folder, I was able to share out my bookmarks with the newest on top.

Here’s the steps:

1. Install Foxmarks.
2. Install SortPlaces. (You will have to log in, as this is still an experimental extension)
3. After you restart Firefox, you will need to configure Foxmarks by creating an account, (you can read how to do that on their site if you need) as well as SortPlaces.  Set your settings like I have below. Due to a bug in the extension, make sure that you select the Unsorted Bookmarks folder and hit okay before turning on automatic syncing or it will sync everything including your bookmarks toolbar.  You want to sort by Date added in reverse order, and turn on automatic syncing.  It’s suggested by the author of the extenstion that you leave the delay to at least 30 seconds to prevent slow-downs on longer bookmark maintenance operations.
   
4. Once you have your bookmarks sorting properly you will need to log in to my.foxmarks.com.  Click on your Unsorted Bookmarks folder, and click the Share button.
5. Enable sharing, and copy the link that it provides.
   
6. Profit! You are now sharing all of your latest finds.  To share a site, just hit the little star in the address bar, and makes sure that it is in the right folder. 

You now have your own bookmarks feed!  I hope that anyone that reads this finds this as useful as I have. You now have the easiest way to share links on the web.

As a bonus, you can even get a widget out of this too.  Here’s what that looks like: