Synchronizing Favorites with Live Mesh

Favorites, Bookmarks, Links, whatever you call them, are places on the web you want to return to at a later time.  I have a few places like this myself which I have divided into two collections based on frequency.

Sites like del.icio.us and diigo, are a perfect solution for storing the catalog of links you find and want to hold onto, but may not frequent very often.  With advanced functionality like tags, lists and annotations link sites can be very useful in building out a personal research library.

Alternatively, for sites I visit multiple times a day I've found that the Links ToolBar in IE is the most lightweight.  The Toolbar determines which Links to show by reading saved Shortcut files in a user-specific folder.

Since my "Frequent" Links collection doesn't change too often, its not too hard to keep them synchronized across multiple computers.  But it is still a manual process and there's room for improvement.

Enter Live Mesh.

One of the features of Live Mesh is to synchronize folders across multiple devices.  This is exactly what needs to be done to keep my Links folder in sync allowing me to choose from the same saved list of "Frequent" Links on any computer connected to the Internet.

How to Synch your Links

  1. Sign in to Mesh.com and connect to your Live Desktop
  2. Double-click Create New Folder
  3. Enter "Links" as the new folder name
  4. On a computer with Live Mesh installed, after a few seconds you'll notice a new Shortcut on the desktop.
  5. Double-click the new Shortcut and synchronize the folder to the existing Links folder IE is already monitoring:

    Windows Vista Example - C:\Users\Adam\Favorites\Links
    Windows XP Example - C:\Documents and Settings\Adam\Favorites\Links
  6. Now the last step is to add the Links Toolbar in IE (if you haven't already).
posted on May 23rd, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (3)

3 Comments »

  1. Nice article. For completeness, here is a Firefox extension that I love: Foxmarks. It synchronizes your bookmarks between as many instances of Firefox as you want.

    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2410

    Laurent

    Comment by Laurent Bugnion - May 24, 2008 @ 1:22 AM
  2. This is great, but unfortunately IE engineers came up with a brilliant idea to store links in "Favorites" but store _their_order_ in registry! I like the order of my bookamrks to be tha same on all machines, so I'm using Firefox. It is possible so set up the location of the bookmarks file in Firefox to a folder different from the profile - so I've set it to my documents folder which I mesh'ed. Works great.

    Comment by serge - May 24, 2008 @ 9:45 PM
  3. @Laurent - I thought there would be an equivalent in Firefox, thanks for the link.

    @serge - Hmm understood about the ordering problem. I'm glad to hear you can use Mesh with Firefox as well.

    Comment by Adam Kinney - May 27, 2008 @ 11:07 AM

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