Since few months, I was struggling to maintain my local system bookmarks between all my systems (3 desktops + 2 laptops); as each has its own version; and its hard to maintain them and also to keep them in sync. I found an interesting solution with Yahoo! online bookmarks; which offers easy and convenient way of managing the bookmarks online.

The factor which I really liked is; importing from your local browser and also exporting the online version to Internet Explorer or Firefox or XML compatible; so that you can reimport them back to any local browser. This is indeed a good solution to keep all bookmarks online. Not only it maintains; but when you are away from your regular systems; you can still access your bookmarks; just by logging into Yahoo! account; which anyway I do it because I access Yahoo! mail and My Yahoo! all the time.

Here is what I did to keep all my bookmarks in sync in all systems along with keeping a copy online:

  • Exported all my bookmarks from my latop Internet Explorer browser to bookmarks.htm file
  • Imported and exported for rest of the systems; so that all bookmarks on all systems are in sync.
  • Opened Yahoo! online bookmarks and logged in.
  • Click on tools -> Import bookmarks, will lead to Import bookmarks page
  • Selected the bookmarks file and then imported under no category
  • Now, I have all my bookmark links online.
  • I did another export from online version to IE version of bookmarks file from tools -> export bookmarks and reimporting them on local system IE seemed to work fine.

Good to go. Even though the bookmarks failed to import directly from my browser; and filled a bug report on this to the team. This would help not to worry about export and import factors. Another interesting thing is; even if you don’t want to keep the local version of bookmarks in browser; you can stil install Yahoo! toolbar; which includes the online version of bookmaks manager within the tool itself; which is very convenient and handy and syncs with online version automatically when you add any bookmark to local toolbar.