Avoiding Bookmarks File Conflicts

Have you and a colleague both simultaneously made changes to a document file?  When you discover this, a decision must be made to keep one person's changes and discard, or manually paste in, the others'.  Well, the same thing can happen between Bookdog and a web browser or other application.


Bookmarks of all online services, and all browsers' except Safari's

Most web browsers, except Safari, ignore and overwrite any changes to your bookmarks file you make while using Bookdog.  Obviously, this is also the case with online bookmarks storage services such as del.icio.us. Therefore, if, while using Bookdog, you use one of these browsers to visit a site, and then decide to make some changes (say, add a bookmark) using a browser or its bookmarks manager, you cannot "just do it". You must:

  1. In Bookdog, menu File > Save your work.
  2. If an Alert appears, read the instructions and click Cancel or Write.
  3. In the web browser, make your desired changes (add bookmark or whatever).  Camino and Firefox will save your changes immediately, but with some of the others, or to be safe, quit the browser to make sure it is not holding anything back.
  4. In Bookdog, Revert to read in the changes you just made in your browser.

If you "just do" step 3, and then later want to save your work in Bookdog, Bookdog will tell you that you must choose between keeping the changes you made in the browser, or the changes you made in Bookdog, and lose the others' changes.  You sometimes get this warning even if you do all three steps, since browsers are often making trivial changes to your bookmarks file as you browse, for example timestamping when you visit a site.  In this case, if you know you have made more important changes in Bookdog, click Write.


Safari's bookmarks.

By contrast, Safari and Bookdog behave cooperatively, watching the bookmarks file and re-reading any changes done by the other, so this problem does not occur.  That is why, in Preferences > General > Browser to use when Visiting bookmarks, Bookdog recommends the Safari option for casual users.