How to keep bookmarks private?

    The explosive development of social bookmarking services such as Delicious (formerly del.icio.us), ma.gnolia , etc. revealed a very large number of users who are willing to share their bookmarks. These services have gathered entire communities. However, today it’s not about them, but about those who need a convenient and safe tool to access their bookmarks. There are links that must be maintained and not advertised. This can be links to pages with financial data or links to the administrative parts of the site or even porn links;). You must hide these links from everyone, but not depend on a specific computer. The following is an overview of two methods, for users of social bookmarking and for adherents of the old school bookmark storage in the browser.

    Social bookmarking.
    Social bookmarking services are a very convenient tool for storing your bookmarks and a way to share with others. Just because they make it easy to share bookmarks does not mean that you need to do this. In theory, you could keep all your bookmarks private. In this way, bookmarks can be stored confidentially on all social bookmarking services. To do this, when you save a bookmark, do not forget to mark the bookmark as closed to others.

    In the del.icio.us plugin for Firefox, do not share should be noted
    In the del.icio.us plugin for Firefox, do not share

    Old school =)

    This may seem primitive, but you can simply export your bookmarks from Firefox to a regular HTML file and upload it to your own server or to a flash drive that you always carry with you. In Firefox, select the “Bookmarks” menu item next to “Manage bookmarks ...”, in the opened bookmark management window, select File -> Export.
    Export bookmarks in Firefox
    Export bookmarks in Firefox

    The bookmarks.html file can be added to the archive with a password and not worry about the safety of your bookmarks. You can also upload this file to a personal server on the Internet. To do this, create a folder on the server, for example, “bookmarks” and upload your bookmark file there (you can rename it to index.html). In the created folder, create the “.htaccess” file and write in it:
    AuthName "Password Protect Directory"
    AuthType Basic
    AuthUserFile /path/to/bookmarks/.htpasswd
    
    Require valid-user
    


    Instead of “/ path / to /” you must specify the full path to the “bookmarks” folder. Now in this folder you need to create a .htpasswd file with text in the format:
    username: encryptedpassword


    Where username is the username, any name, you can use your nickname and encryptedpassword is the encrypted password. To get this string use this service .
    Now, when accessing this folder through a browser, for example, www.site.ru/user/bookmarks , the browser will ask you to enter a username and password.
    If this method seemed too complicated to you or you do not have such knowledge, we recommend that you look in the direction of the Firefox plugin called Foxmarks. He will do the same automatically. To do this, you need to specify only the username and password for FTP access to your server. If you have a problem with your own server, I suggest using data storage services. Although they are not intended for storing bookmarks, in this method they can do this very well. Essentially, you need to find a free hosting with ftp access .

    FoxmarksFoxmarks
    That's all I wanted to say! Keep your bookmarks clean and tidy =)

    Original article

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