From: Eric Shubert <ejs@shubes.net>
[snip]
> The idea is to have your data (bookmarks being a subset) available to 
> any client, any device. This would include multiple VMs on your
workstation.

Going from "bookmarks" to "arbitrary data" isn't feature creep, it's feature
Mach 2.

But for bookmarks, what I'd probably do is build a little website[0].  There'd
be an "admin" part, where you could add or delete bookmarks using a simple
form, protected by user/pass auth, over HTTPS, etc.  Then there'd be the
"public" part, where you go to http://example.org/bookmarks/ and get a nice
simple dynamically generated HTML page showing all the bookmarks you entered
as regular <li><a href="...">bookmark description</a> items.  And a form where
you could search for bookmarks/URLs matching keywords or regexps.  Accessible
anywhere you've got web access, usable in any browser, easy for multiple
VMs/whatever to deal with.  It just won't work if your URLs contain file://
protocol IDs[1].  And it won't be exactly like a bookmarks menu.[2]

The main problem there is populating the table with all your initial
bookmarks.  That's mostly saving your current bookmarks in a file, running a
few regexps to get rid of extraneous junk, and importing that into the DB. 
You also have to have a website with {PHP, Ruby, CGI-Perl, whatever} and DB
access.

I've done something very similar, but it wasn't a "shared bookmarks" thing. 
It was a URL shortener[3], http://crow202.org/shorturl.php .  The basic idea
could be revamped into shared bookmarks, or expanded into storing a bunch of
arbitrary data.  I built that for me, because I was the only one who was going
to change the DB.  But it could be made multi-user, and everything in the DB
could be encrypted for privacy, or whatever.

(The initial requirements were sorta nebulous, so if I totally missed the
point of this whole thing, my bad....)

[0] When your toolbox is full of LAMP, everything looks like a website.
[1] That'd just be silly anyway.
[2] This may be a deal-breaker depending on the application.
[3] Of course I could use any of the extant URL shorteners, but where's the
fun in THAT?

-- 
Matt G / Dances With Crows
The Crow202 Blog:  http://crow202.org/wordpress/
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see

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