Synchronizing Favorites with Live Mesh

Adam Kinney — Fri, 23 May 2008 23:42:00 GMT

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

Sign in to Mesh.com and connect to your Live Desktop
Double-click Create New Folder
Enter "Links" as the new folder name
On a computer with Live Mesh installed, after a few seconds you'll notice a new Shortcut on the desktop.
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
Now the last step is to add the Links Toolbar in IE (if you haven't already).

Adam Kinney posts tagged with 'internet explorer'

Synchronizing Favorites with Live Mesh

How to Synch your Links