Untying the Apron Strings

As part of the process of changing jobs I am try to move central control from my soon to be ex-company laptop to my own machine at home.

I have already followed a good set of instructions on moving my iTunes library, even though I lost all of my podcast subscriptions. Overall the process was greatly simplified by the fact that I use a USB disk to hold all of the podcast and music files.

The next big thing for me is to break the ties from my browser(s). I use bookmarks a lot and was looking for something useful to keep my bookmarks in synch.

I was playing with the idea of using Jetpaks which I have found to be extremely useful for collating and aggregating links I am using for specific research. But before I took the plunge I had a quick walk around to see if this was something easier then the good old export/import process.

I found many, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, including Foxmarks and Google Browser Synch.

I decided to try out these two:

• BookKit
  
• 2Go synch

BookIt is an extension of the export/import method that creates an online central repository of bookmarks that you can then use to synch up other machines and browsers as this supports both Firefox and IE. One of the features that I liked was the ability to copy or merge in the case of duplicates.

2Go was equally useful in terms of supporting both IE and Firefox. You need to install a small application on each subscriber/publisher and this is used to handle the export/import process. The one downside that I found with this application was the ease that it was confused by non-standard characters. Some of my bookmarks have Thai characters in them which meant that some weren't synched at all.

All in all I think I prefer the BookIt method as it is easy to browse the repository and clean up old or unwanted links. Although I haven't yet tried the synch back process as I need to wait until I am at my new central machine. Update to follow.

More ideas are available from here