Refined by Fire

My main Web browser has been Firefox for quite some time now. I like all the great extensions available. And the support for standards-based design is fantastic. I also make good use of bookmarklets, which you can do in other browsers too, but that just isn’t compelling enough to make me switch.

However, if you’re like me with FF and you just got an iPhone, you may be wondering how in world you’re going to get a bookmarklet saved into your bookmarks because you can’t click and drag links like you can on a desktop. I became slightly distressed as I wanted to continue bookmarking and tagging and having all that fun in ma.gnolia.

When I first activated my iPhone, I opted to NOT import my bookmarks from Safari because I didn’t know what was in there and I didn’t want a bunch of old stuff populating my pristine Safari on the iPhone.

However, that is the key to getting your magnolicious bookmarking feature to work on your iPhone. My recommendation: get rid of all the bookmarks in Safari (desktop’s not iPhone’s) and have only the one bookmark that matters: your ma.gnolia bookmarklet. Whether you delete them or export them and reimport them, you’re probably not going to want too many bookmarks coming over… then again, maybe you do. It’s your choice.

Once you’ve got your bookmarks just right, head over to iTunes. With your iPhone plugged in, select the “Info” tab. Then scroll down a ways. You’ll find where you can opt to sync your Safari bookmarks. Select that checkbox, hit “Sync.”

Now, just that one bookmarklet (or whatever else you have) will come over. And viola, whenever you’re on a page you want to share in ma.gnolia, use the bookmarklet just like you would in your standard browser, open your bookmarks, click “Mark in Magnolia” proceed as normal.

Note: Apparently you can only have a limited number of pages open on your iPhone’s Safari. Since this works like a pop-up, make sure you don’t have too many pages open.

Hope that helps someone.