For the past year I have been searching for a way to synchronize bookmarks between two different web browsers. To this point I had been unsuccessful. This afternoon I thought I would send out a tweet and sure enough I got some responses from my contacts.

A couple suggested using the online bookmarking service Delicious and although I am a big fan of the service, and it is great that you then have access to your bookmarks as long as you have an Internet connection, I have always viewed using it as a work-around for this particular problem.

I got another suggestion from a friend of mine, Vic Hooper who suggested I try Bookdog from Sheep Systems. Well let me tell you, when I started to read the description on the website about what this little program could do, I got pretty darn excited! (by the way this software is Mac only)

Bookdog allows users to sort (selectively alphabetize), import/export, migrate, verify, find redirects, search, and find duplicates among their bookmarks collections in Safari, Firefox 1.5-3.0, Camino, Google Bookmarks, del.icio.us, OmniWeb, Opera, Shiira 2.x and Netscape Navigator. Migrations can be scheduled using Apple's Automator, and bookmarks on other networked Macs or backup disks are easily accessible.

So I downloaded the software and gave it a spin. Now it was not the most intuitive software to jump right into, (I did watch the first 30 seconds of a screen cast on their website to see how to get started) but this may have also been due to my apprehension of not wanting to muck up a few years of Bookmarks. I would recommend backing up or exporting your bookmarks before you begin.

I went right the to the "New Migration/Synchronization" menu item in the file menu and was presented with a box of options, which let me configure if I wanted to migrate or sync from Safari to Firefox or vice versa, and which browsers bookmarks should be considered the Master Set when a conflict occurred.

After clicking the ever so exciting "Do It" button, I was presented with the results of the comparison the bookmarks. Essentially what the software does, is it copies all the bookmarks from one browser to the other, then copies all of the bookmarks back to the first browser, ensuring along the way that no duplicates are created. When you think about it, as long as the duplicate checking works, it really is a simple concept. After you click the OK button in the results window, you are left with two new windows (because I was doing a synchronization, if doing a migration there would only be one window) with listings of all of the bookmarks for each browser. The important thing to remember at this point is to go back into your File Menu and "Save All Bookmarks Documents". This essentially commits your changes in each of the appropriate browsers.

At this point I had completed my original goal, and I now have complete copies of my bookmarks in both of my two main browsers, and once I sync up, also on my iPhone.

But I wasn't done yet. I also used the verify feature of the software to go out and make sure that all of my bookmarks were still valid, and you know what, about 75 were no longer working. Again you are presented with a quick and easy list of the problems, which allows you to quickly and easily view or edit each link and verify that indeed the link no longer exists.

If the page has moved, Bookdog automagically updates your bookmark as well to the new URL. This was the case for 83 of my bookmarks.

Lastly I checked for duplicates, and found that I had 42 links that I had bookmarked twice, I guess I really wanted to make sure I saved those URLs. Bookdog quickly compared the bookmarks and then asked me which ones I wanted to keep one by one, which only took a few minutes to go through. Next time I would do this step first, as I now had to replace my Firefox Bookmarks with the edited list from Safari, but no big deal really.

Tomorrow I am going to download an automator action or two that Sheep Systems has available and do some fancy stuff like synchronize my bookmarks automatically every day!

All in all this is a great piece of software that I will be purchasing before my 14 day trial is up. Oh the cost of the software is just under $20 and in my mind is one of the most valuable pieces of software I have ever found!

Thanks Vic! I owe you a Beer or Two!

• Darren Mak's blog