Yellow is the New Blog

I'm a big fan of XMarks, previously an extension for Firefox called Foxmarks for synchronizing bookmarks across multiple computers, now a cross-browser (IE and Safari, in addition to Firefox) extension that also allows synchronization of saved passwords... which is a handy feature, but I'm not too keen on storing all my site passwords on their server. While updating my preferences to disable that option, I stumbled upon a setting to "Use own server".

Intrigued, I clicked "Learn More", certain it'd be instructions for integrating it with PHP or Rails... but was pleasantly surprised to see that they support FTP but recommend WebDAV. Heck, I've had WebDAV set up on Ophelia for years. So I tossed a new database out there to store the XMarks data, and a couple minutes later had repointed the 3 laptops I use regularly to the Domino location. Works like a charm. Here's all you have to do:

1. Configure your Domino server to support WebDAV on for at least one DNS address.
2. Choose (or create) a database to store your data, and make sure it's set up correctly for WebDAV (allow design locking, No Access for Anonymous, Designer or above access for the account you'll authenticate as, maximum Internet access set to Designer)
3. In your XMarks settings, enable "Use own server", then specify the URL of a file resource (which doesn't need to exist in the database... it'll be created automatically) for each feature you want to use; for example:
http://dns/path.nsf$Files/xmarks.json
http://dns/path.nsf$Files/passwords.json
(where dns is the DNS address you configured to support WebDAV and path is the location of the database that will store the data)
NOTE: notice there's no slash between .nsf and $Files... while YMMV, I've found that including a slash confuses Domino. It tries to find a view called $Files instead of realizing you're trying to access the database via WebDAV.

That's it. That's all there is to it.

Weird... no code at all? Did I just submit an admin tip? Huh. Okay, then I'll end it with a development tease: I suspect if you replace the above URL syntax with URL's to agents/XPages/custom controls, you could do some crazy fun stuff with the posted JSON... but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader ( <cough> dogear </cough> ).