found drama

Time for another one of the infamous ‘wishlist, a.k.a. “why don’t you go and develop it yourself, lamer?” posts…

One bookmark list to link them all, one list to bind them.

If you do any kind of web dev (PC or Mac, don’t matter…) then chances are you have not one but several damn browsers loaded on your box at any given time. One of them you leave in your Dock (or Start menu or what have you) as your browser-of-choice, but each one rears its head every once in a while. Personally, I feel married to Safari. I love how quickly the app loads from a dead stop but do get annoyed from time to time when I click on “Bookmarks” and then wait 5-6 seconds for it to remember what the click means it’s supposed to be doing. But at the same time, I find myself using Firefox frequently in addition to Safari. Too bad Firefox didn’t let me import my Safari bookmarks. (Import from IE?? WTF??)

But it’s not a 2-browser game, either. Firefox by day, Safari by night, Camino every once in a while, Mozilla from time-to-time, Opera for some deep-cross-browser-checking, and MSIE when I absolutely must. 6 browsers right there! And that’s not counting Lynx! (j/k?)

Now, granted I’m thinking that this (potential) hack is strictly a Mac-centric thing here … and Safari-centric (at that) but hey… You do what you know, right?

So, Safari keeps its bookmarks in a file @ ~/Library/Safari/Bookmarks.plist. As any Mac hacker knows, the .plist files are just flat-text XML docs that Apple uses to store an application’s dependent information in an easy-to-read, easy-to-store, easy-to-recover(/hack) format that is accessible to mere mortals (i.e., those that do not dream in assembly language). Now, take a peak at your Bookmarks.plist… I would argue that a great deal of this is super easy to figure out as a “mere mortal”. Next step? An app or script (XSLT, anyone?) that breezes through this file and renders (on the fly) a page (served up via the built-in Apache, perhaps? And/or Rendezvous?) that has all those bookmarks on it for you already. Thus you can set your homepage in any browser to http://localhost/~user/bookmarks.html and have ready access to said linkage.

Beats paying for .Mac, that’s for sure…

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