SyncPlaces Advanced OptionsThe Advanced tab contains six tabs of its own. The first contains general options ...
By default all your bookmarks are sent to and received from your server (and all of them are exported/imported/sorted). If you uncheck the 'Synchronise all ...' checkbox then you can use the 'Select folder ...' button to choose a single folder to synchronise on. In this case only the contents of this folder are sent to and received from your server. This may be useful if you wish to share only part of your bookmarks between browsers. When the pop-up window appears, highlight the folder you wish to synchronise on and click the OK button to accept this.
Set this up as follows: On your first browser select a folder to synchronise and then 'Send'. On subsequent browsers select a folder to receive into and 'Receive': By default this folder must have the same name (for safety), but can be anywhere in your Bookmarks. If you don't already have a folder to receive into then simply add one with the correct name using the Bookmarks Organiser, You can even use an existing folder with the right name (or rename it) and maybe use the merge option as well.
If you wish to override the default and use a folder with a different name, then use the 'Allow different name ...' option, and choose a folder of any name using the 'Select folder ...' button.
Note: This option also applies to sorting and the import and export XBEL options. But does not apply when you click 'Backup' or 'Restore', which is always a full backup/restore for safety.
Note: The pop-up window that you select your folder from is 'live' so if you drag folders around this window it will affect your bookmarks.
When bookmarks are synchronised the URLs of their associated favicons are also synchronised. When receiving a new favicon URL, Firefox silently retrieves the actual icon over the Internet (if it needs to). This shouldn't cause any issues but I've added the 'Update favicons' option to allow this to be turned off if it causes any problems.
The 'Show status bar icon' option allows you to turn off the icon on the status bar, and the 'Select folder to backup to' option allows you to decide where the backup and transfer files are stored should you wish to move them from their default location (your profile folder).
Normally the bookmarks in your local browser are replaced by the ones on the server when you click the 'Receive' button. Use the 'Merge received' option on the Merging tab to merge the server bookmarks with your local ones instead, so that you do not lose any new bookmarks or changes. This option also works with the 'Select folder ...' option if you wish to synchronise on just a single folder.
Merging occurs as follows:
Deciding what to do about duplicates by using timestamps may not be what you want as it relies on the clocks on each browser being roughly in sync (timezones don't matter because UTC is used throughout). Instead you can choose to always keep your browser's version: 'Use local', or always keep your server's version: 'Use remote'.
With items locally or remotely deleted since the last synchronisation, the last modified timestamp is used to determine whether something should be deleted or re-added. Queries do not have any timestamps, so SyncPlaces adds an annotation with a nominal 'date added' timestamp, but you still will not be able to rename queries easily.
XBEL Note: XBEL does not allow properties for separators so they are always restored if locally or remotely deleted. If you receive/import XBEL without the SyncPlaces annotations, deleted queries will also be restored because their timestamps will also be lost.
Also be aware that Firefox may update the last modified timestamp of items of it's own accord (don't ask me why), so items may not be always removed when deleted remotely - but manually deleting them will take care of this. Finally note that if you modify or add an item within a local folder, this item will still be deleted if the whole folder is deleted remotely.
If you wish to ignore all deletes, whether remote or local, then simply uncheck the 'Merge deletes' option and nothing will be deleted.
By default everything received from the server is merged in. However, by unchecking the 'Merge everything' option you can select what to consider when merging. In particular you can choose to only merge in items on the toolbar, in the unsorted folder, in the main bookmarks menu, or a combination of all three using the radio buttons provided. You can also decide what type of things to merge in using the checkboxes provided. For example you may not wish to merge in separators, or only merge in livemarks.
The options on this tab allow you to change the way that sorting will work. Remember that if you have set a 'folder to synchronise' then only that folder will be sorted. Also note that items are sorted within groups divided by separators. So if you have a separator in the middle of a folder, all the items above the separator will be sorted independently of all the items below it.
You can set different sort options for the Bookmarks Menu and Toolbar separately, and for each you can set two levels of sort. On each tab use the dropdown to select what you wish to sort by.
Bookmarks, folders etc are normally sorted in increasing alphabetical or numerical order depending on the option chosen. You can use the 'Reverse order' option to change this.
Sorting of Names and Descriptions is normally done in a case sensitive way, e.g. 'a' comes before 'A'. But you can use the 'Case insensitive' option to completely ignore this when sorting (i.e. 'a' == 'A').
When sorting occurs you can decide whether to group items of the same type together and where they appear using the 'Sort order' options. Change the numbers displayed to decide how you wish to group and order the four basic bookmark items. The numbers represent where the item will appear after sorting with a lower number meaning a higher position in the results. So for example if you wish folders to always appear before queries and queries before bookmarks, with livemarks grouped together at the bottom, then set 'Folders' to '1', 'Queries' to '2', 'Bookmarks' to '3' and 'Livemarks' to '4'. If you wish two or more items to be treated equally and not grouped together, then set the order of them to be the same, e.g. set both 'Bookmarks' and 'Livemarks' to '3'.
On this tab you can enter styling tags that will be added to the top of the XBEL file when exported or sent to the server. Then when you open the XBEL file with your browser it will be transformed and styled as described by these tags and displayed appropriately. This is great for remotely accessing your bookmarks.
As an example, first enter the following tag into SyncPlaces: <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="xbel.xsl"?>
Then download this zipped package of files, unzip them into the same folder as your XBEL file, open up the XBEL file in Firefox and they will be nicely styled. Note: The files originally come from one of the old Bookmark Synchronizer extensions, were given away freely, but do not contain any copyright message and the associated sites are now dead (even the wayback machine couldn't help), and the authors uncontactable. So if you know who the original author(s) were please let me know so I can credit them here.
The 'Export/Send small XBEL' option gets rid of all the extra XML that is used to store keywords, tags, annotation etc. when synchronising. The XBEL file produced is much smaller and ideal for transforming using XSL or importing into non-Firefox browsers. This option is only available if you synchronise using JSON and choose to 'Send XBEL' as well
You can choose between two different encryption systems when encrypting your passwords or bookmarks. AES or TEA. TEA is much faster than AES, but is probably less safe, but make you own mind up (I use TEA). But even TEA is quite slow with large files as it is all being done in Javascript (newer Firefox releases should help with this).
If you are encrypting your bookmarks using AES, then you can select the level of this encryption using the 'Bits for encryption' option. The greater the number of bits used, the harder it will be to decrypt them. However, it will take much longer to encrypt and decrypt when using 192 or 256 bits.
Warning: The options on this tab are only normally of use if you are having problems. Using them when you do not have any problems may cause SyncPlaces to stop working or side-effects to occur.
Details of using these options are provided on the Support page.
