Bookmark sync design
Jan. 15th, 2007 07:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackGoogle sync will probably take care of me. But in case you're curious, here's what I would do if I could, it sounds simple enough. Does anyone write Firefox extensions, please implement it! I might get round to it, but not soon.
* Remember the time of the last sync and if since then:
** If the local is unchanged and the remote has changed, copy the remote to the local.
** If the remote is unchanged and the local has changed, copy the local to the remote.
** If both have changed, "merge" the files.
* Merge means, examine both markup-language trees and put in the output everything in either input
* The above sync operation should be run:
** Automatically before adding a bookmark
** Automatically after adding a bookmark
** Automatically on opening the browser
** Automatically, [once] a day
** Manually with a button that shows the current state and says "upload" "download" or "merge"
I think this has all the properties I want. So long as both computers are online while I'm using them, bookmarks will propagate not slower than 24 hours, and never become conflicted.
The worst that can happen is that one computer be offline when I use it and that I then delete or move a bookmark in one browser and do anything to a bookmark in the other (which is unlikley, if it's offline, I'm probably not firefoxing, am I?). In that case, the bookmark will have to be redeleted. You could fix this by adding mark-up elements to indicate which computer did what, but it's probably not worth it.
Note, this works because I don't use add bookmarks all the time. Opening an scp connection every two minutes could be wasteful, but one a day is fine :)
Also, you could do something similar external to Firefox, but you'd have to watch the bookmark file and see when it changes, and have a cache from before it changed. And it works fairly easily because of the tree-nature: you *can* sync text files, but merging is confusing.
* Remember the time of the last sync and if since then:
** If the local is unchanged and the remote has changed, copy the remote to the local.
** If the remote is unchanged and the local has changed, copy the local to the remote.
** If both have changed, "merge" the files.
* Merge means, examine both markup-language trees and put in the output everything in either input
* The above sync operation should be run:
** Automatically before adding a bookmark
** Automatically after adding a bookmark
** Automatically on opening the browser
** Automatically, [once] a day
** Manually with a button that shows the current state and says "upload" "download" or "merge"
I think this has all the properties I want. So long as both computers are online while I'm using them, bookmarks will propagate not slower than 24 hours, and never become conflicted.
The worst that can happen is that one computer be offline when I use it and that I then delete or move a bookmark in one browser and do anything to a bookmark in the other (which is unlikley, if it's offline, I'm probably not firefoxing, am I?). In that case, the bookmark will have to be redeleted. You could fix this by adding mark-up elements to indicate which computer did what, but it's probably not worth it.
Note, this works because I don't use add bookmarks all the time. Opening an scp connection every two minutes could be wasteful, but one a day is fine :)
Also, you could do something similar external to Firefox, but you'd have to watch the bookmark file and see when it changes, and have a cache from before it changed. And it works fairly easily because of the tree-nature: you *can* sync text files, but merging is confusing.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-15 07:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-15 08:02 pm (UTC)And as I say, I don't see why it should come up.
You could of course add twiddles, such as adding a "deleted" tag when you delete and then the merge could actually delete that; or have the merge prepend "MERGED" to the names so you can sort them out if you want as you come across them; or try to do something more intelligent that will deal with moving folders; or alerting you when things are unsyncable and warning you not to fiddle.