in fact, the simple DOS & CuteFTP scripts i put together to upload stuff to the server were working fine, but i missed having my IE Favorites mirror my Moz bookmarks.

and i knew about the "bookmark" sharing abilities of Moz/Firebird (in fact, Netscape 4.x would let you open up and use a bookmarks file outside of your profile, so it would even "share" bookmarks files with Moz/FB, though 4.x's bookmarks file format is a little elderly and not as featureful).
In fact, on my machines here in the office (i've got two on my desk, one for dev, one for testing (bog standard windows & browser installations), and i'm actually using the "My Documents" folder on the testing machine (shared over the network) as the "My Documents" folder on my dev machine, and the bookmarks.html file sits in that folder and is shared between Firebird (dev) and Netscape 6.2 & Netscape 4.76 (test). it's a little cooky, but it works!

I *didn't* know about the cache sharing thing however… that's a pretty nifty idea. of course, since we've high speed 'net connections, i typically set my cache to 5MB or less. don't really need the cache if the pipe's thick enough.

i've been to IUMA or some related sites before, and from what i can recall, it was pretty crap. mp3.com wasn't all that great (it constantly pissed me off that there was no easy "login" link, and that it tried to make you put in your email address every damn time you wanted to listen to a track) so i'm really not all that sad that it's gone. but it is certainly going to send some artists scrambling to get their stuff together and up somewhere else.

i've had the luxury of running my own websites since i've been in a band, so i've been able to host my own stuff. makes it much easier, and you can't go wrong with your own domain name.

"They don't limit the amount of songs you post, they allow flash on their site, pictures, lyrics, stats, charts. You have full and instant control over the content on your pages, no waiting for apporval from staff or anything for mp3 uploads like mp3.com or garageband. The only thing is no song can be larger than 10mb. I've used it for years."

also, unison and rsync are both simple file syncronizers. actually, rsync is an even simpler "mirrorer" if the unison site is to be taken at face value.

syncit has the advantage, for windows users, obviously of being able to keep in sync both the IE favorites directory (which are URL filesystem objects) and Netscape/Mozilla bookmarks files on a single machine, as well as allowing syncronizing to a central server.

so, if i make a change to or add a bookmark in Firebird, IE will automatically get that change or addition propagated to it's Favorites directory. The change will also be propagated to the central server, where any other client (that logs in with my user info) can get the latest changes. By this method, i have NS/Moz & IE bookmarks syncronized across three different machines. All without me even having to think about it.

unison would be a good replacement for the current batch files i have running on my machines now that upload and download other pertinent files to & from a central server, but it couldn't replace syncit without adding some cross-browser aware, bookmark specific functionality.

it would be interesting to see if they could add some functionality to the client that would allow *direct* syncronization… i.e. not having to use a central server, rather going in a P2P fashion.

of course, then i wouldn't be able to log into the syncit server software to access my bookmarks from any ol' web browser.

rsync, man, rsync. And if you want something pretty, http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/