I'm having a problem with my bookmarks, and hotlist for the past few hours. I had a crash earlier, and don't know if it's related or not.

Anyway, I have IE6, and Opera, but have never had Netscape on my system. When I installed k-meleon(8.2) I imported my ie favorites, but not Opera. I had k-mel create it's own hotlist, and bookmarks. That way I have 2 different sets of native web-links. But all of a sudden something happened(?). Now, whenever I click menu, and then mouse-over bookmarks k-mel crashes. I've tried multiple times. When I go to the hotlist, it comes up but has become blank/erased/?. The favorites still work though.

The 1st thing I thought of was my history(although it works fine-couldn't think of anything else). It was up to about 1000 kb, so I tried removing it, and restarting. No help there. Then I tried my system restore(comp. novice's best friend ), and went back 1 day, but it didn't work either.

I really don't want to re-install, as I have many irreplacable bookmarks that I don't want to lose. The hotlist doesn't really matter. I just had my most frequented sites on it, and can replace from memory easily.

Suggestions anyone?

Thanks.

> I imported my ie favorites, but not Opera.

Normal, during installation, Opera plugin installation is not checked by default
I think that you can activate it without reinstallating (Preferences>>Plugins) and change default folder for hotlist.

For history, no idea

Thanks for replying alain, although I'm not really sure what you're talking about. I'm not trying to import Opera's hotlist. I created a native hotlist(k-mel), which seems to have been erased. It's not a big problem anyway. I can re-do the few I had easily. As to history, I never said I had a problem with it, I said it was one of the things I tried to fix my bookmarks problem.

The main problem I have is my k-mel crashes when I try to call up bookmarks, and trying to recover them.

I guess you didn't understand my post. But like I said, thanks for the reply anyway.

Never heard of this particular problem so my only suggestion would be an uninstall and then reinstall of K-Meleon. You don't have to lose your bookmarks file. In Windows Explorer, go into your profile K-Meleon directory typically located at:

C:\PROGRAM FILES\K-MELEON\Profiles\default[i]xxxxxxxx[/i].slt

Right-click & copy the bookmarks.html file. Then paste it into your My Documents folder or any other folder where you keep your important files. Then after uninstalling and reinstalling KM, when it asks you to locate your bookmarks file, just browse to your My Documents folder and choose the bookmarks.html file you copied. You can do the same procedure with your hotlist file if you want.

Actually, before uninstalling and reinstalling, after you copied & pasted your bookmarks file to My Documents, rename the original file in the K-Meleon profile directory and when K-Meleon restarts, have it create a new blank bookmarks file. If the crash no longer happens, then it might be a size issue with your original bookmarks file. Is your bookmarks file very large?

Thanks for replying jsnj.

I took you're advice. Just to be safe I copied my whole k-meleon 8.2 folder, and placed it in another folder in "my documents". I then uninstalled k-mel. All the profiles, folders, everything.

Then I re-installed 8.2. I let it create new bookmarks, and hotlist. I then went to prog files/k-mel/profiles/default/mlaaage.slt, deleted the bookmarks.html, and pasted in the old bookmarks.html I copied before uninstalling. Restarted k-meleon, went to bookmarks.....................Boom!!! Crashed again.

I then put back the blank bookmarks, and added a few webpages to it(just to check it), and it worked fine.

Then I opened both bookmarks.html's in notepad to see what they looked like, and I think I found the problem. Where the new functioning bookmark.html would have something like(ex):<DT><A HREF="" ADD_DATE="1073634043" LAST_VISIT="1073632977" LAST_MODIFIED="0"></A>: followed by the name of the page, the old non-working bookmark.html was filled with entries like the previous, but with no names after them. I don't know what could have happened to erase all the names, but leave the first part.

You asked about the size of the old bookmarks. I guess-timate I had about 90-100 bookmarks in it. The size of it was 8kb, but if you factor in the fact that all the names are gone, I'm guessing it could have been about twice that size, or 16kb before it got screwed up.

Would that have been big enough to cause something to mess up?

Also, is there any way to trace/reconstruct the bookmarks address from just that first line?

Any thoughts?

THANKS.




P.S.
Anybody care to suggest a good, free bookmark manager that works well with K-mel, Opera, and IE? I don't want to lose my bookmarks again.

I know from personal experience that importing favorites into KM bookmarks is buggy in that it does strange things sometimes to some of the url addresses. I'm sure somebody can provide a more technically sound explanation as to what characters are not being read correctly etc... If I'm not mistaken, I believe MonkeeSage's bookmarks.dll handles importation a little better, so you can try that one and see if it's better.

As far as external bookmark managers, a good source for freeware is webattack/snapfiles or softpedia.
Here's one recommendation from KM's site.

Not sure, maybe I'm misreading you're post. I have never "imported" anything into my k-mel bookmarks. They are all from surfing with k-mel. Maybe that's what you meant though. It doesn't seem to be a case of not reading the characters correctly, it's the fact that it seems that half of the code/name/entry of each of my (old)bookmark's seems to have disappeared.

Like I said earlier, the old, non-working bookmark.html is filled with about 90 or so lines like....<DT><A HREF="" ADD_DATE="1073634043" LAST_VISIT="1073632977" LAST_MODIFIED="0"></A>....., but with no webpage name after/before any of them.


The only thing I have ever imported are ie favorites, and they work fine. I've had 8.2 for several months, and never had a problem. I've also had versions, 8.0, 8.1, 7, and 6, and never had a problem.

It's not a case of recently installing k-mel, and having problems with the bookmarks. I've been running k-mel for over 1 year, never having a problem with anything bookmark/hotlist/favorites related. I've had 8.2 for several months, and never had a problem. This is something that came out of the blue.

Maybe someone else will be able to tell me something.

Thanks jsnj.
rjf

...When I installed k-meleon(8.2) I imported my ie favorites,....

I misinterpreted that, sorry.


It's not a case of recently installing k-mel, and having problems with the bookmarks. I've been running k-mel for over 1 year, never having a problem with anything bookmark/hotlist/favorites related. I've had 8.2 for several months, and never had a problem. This is something that came out of the blue.

That would seem to suggest that it's some sort of conflict with possibly something newly added to your PC, another application that changed something perhaps. Maybe a Windows update? I'm just guessing. I'm not knowledgeable enough to offer any further assistance. Hopefully somebody else will. Good luck!

Hello,

I would like to report a similar problem. I use K-meleon, Mozilla Firefox 0.8 and Opera. On installing K-meleon, I was asked the location of the Opera hotlist file and I gave it; ibid for the Mozilla bookmarks.

But then one day my Opera bookmarks (that is my hotlist) disappeared all of a sudden and it really seems that this was called by K-meleon. Actually the file opera6.adr was reduced from over 100 kb to 0kb.

Rather frightening, isn't it, especially if you don't have a backup of that file ! Luckily, I had such a backup, on top of the backup that Opera performs on its own.

I think there is really a k-meleon bug behind all this, which has only happened with my Opera bokmarks; there has never been anything wrong with my IE or Mozilla bookmarks.

Please let me know if someone has had the same problem and how he/she solved it.

Jarbo

rjf:

The bookmark format is like this:

<DL><p>
<DT><H3 ADD_DATE="0">Folder</H3>
<DL><p>
<DT><A HREF="http://site.com"; ADD_DATE="0" LAST_VISIT="0" LAST_MODIFIED="0" LAST_CHARSET="ISO-8859-1">Name</A>
<DD>Description
<DT><A HREF="http://site.com"; ADD_DATE="0" LAST_VISIT="0" LAST_MODIFIED="0" LAST_CHARSET="ISO-8859-1">Name</A>
<DD>Description
<DT><A HREF="http://site.com"; ADD_DATE="0" LAST_VISIT="0" LAST_MODIFIED="0" LAST_CHARSET="ISO-8859-1">Name</A>
<DD>Description
</DL><p>
</DL><p>

It sounds like your Descriptions got erased somehow (no clue as to why), but that shouldn't have any ill-effect on the bookmark plugin. But if the Name also got deleted, then you'll have problems. I'm guessing the Name also got deleted in your file.

I've created a PHP script to reconstruct the Names of the bookmark items using either the link url or the page title (it has to connect to each site and extract the title in the latter case and may be pretty slow for alot of bookmarks and a slow connection). It will leave any names that are already there intact.

You can download the script here (rename it to bookmark_fix.php): http://gratisDei.com/bookmark_fix.php.txt

To use it, copy your bookmarks.html file into the same directory with the bookmark_fix.php file and run "php -q bookmark_fix.php" to reconstruct the file using the link urls or "php -q bookmark_fix.php -t" to download the titles. This will output fixed_bookmarks.html which you can copy to your profile directory as bookmarks.html. (Be sure to make a backup first, just in case).

Ps. If you don't have PHP installed and you can post your bookmarks.html file somewhere online, I can download it, fix it, and the re-post it to my site.

Pss. I also made a Ruby version of the script but I think it is less likely that you have Ruby than PHP, but if I'm mistaken I can upload the Ruby version too, just let me know.


Shelumi`El
Jordan

S.D.G

Oops, make that:

http://gratisdei.com/bookmark_fix.txt


Shelumi`El
Jordan

S.D.G

MonkeeSage, thank you very much for replying.

On what's left of my bookmarks.html, the example I listed <DT><A HREF="" ADD_DATE="1073634043" LAST_VISIT="1073632977" LAST_MODIFIED="0"></A> is pretty much everything there is left. I have about 90(or so) lines exactly like that, with a slightly different number of course. And that's it. NOTHING else there. I didn't know if the "1073634043" after "add date" was an address or something that I could enter into a browser or something to go back to the site. Because that's the only descriptive term/character left in the .html.

This may sound stupid but I don't know what php is.
I did a web search, and it seems to be a scripting language(whatever that is ).

Couple of dumb questions:

1) Is php(or ruby) something that comes stock on newer computers/os's?
Mines about 11/2 years old(HP 510n-1.2 celeron-XP Home).

2) If it's not, and I decided to install it on my comp., what does it change/affect?

3) When you said to rename to bookmark_fix.php, did you mean the file itself, the new folder I create to put it(in with my bookmark.html), or both?

4) When you say to run php -q bookmark_fix.php, you mean start/run/(type in)php -q bookmark_fix.php/ok ?

Sorry for the stupid questions, but sometimes I need things spelled out for me.
Thanks.

Since you never had Netscape, your bookmarks folder should be identical to the IE favorites, unless KM donates some folder of its own.
Your Opera Hotlist, by copying the OperaDel6.adr. file from Opera's default folder.
Keep the Hotlist and IE favorites separate.

rjf:

Yikes, it looks like all trace of the URL was wiped out, too! (The "HREF=" part). Not much you can do in that case.

Sorry about that, I thought you had just snipped the HREF part to save space, I didn't realize that part was blanked out too. Looks like you'll have to rebuild you bookmarks from scratch :\

But just to answer your questions:

1. Some *nix distros now include Ruby, but for the most part PHP and Ruby have to be downloaded and installed seperately.

2. Doesn't change anything, it's just like any other program. There is a binary (e.g., php.exe or ruby.exe) that you pass a script (e.g., php somescript.php) and it then interprets the script into byte-code and runs it like a program.

3 & 4. N/A (see above)


Shelumi`El
Jordan

S.D.G

Damn. Looks like bug 371 and bug 636.

This gives me a headache. We need to address this before more people lose their bookmarks/hotlist.

Quote

originally posted by MonkeeSage

Yikes, it looks like all trace of the URL was wiped out, too! (The "HREF=" part). Not much you can do in that case.

Bummer!

Oh well, live, and learn. In the future I will have to start backing up my bookmarks periodically, at least once a week to minimize potential losses. Or I may try a bookmark manager.

You know what the strangest part is to me? The fact that using system restore didn't bring the bookmarks back. This is the 1st time I've had a program mess up that going back to before it first happened didn't restore it to good working order. And I tried it with 2 seperate pre-problem dates.

Anyway, thanks for all your help M.S.(and the php info)


rmn,

You're right. It looks like bugs 371, and 636 both hit me at once. I wish I could remember exactly what I was doing to help identify the bug, but I don't remember anything other than ordinary web-surfing. Like I said before, I will now start backing up both.

rjf, Jarbo, and other people having the same problem,

I've updated those two bugs; please stay around as the devs probably need to confirm something. Adding the bugs to your bug watch list (if you've already got accounts in the BTS) may also be a good idea.

Please supply more info in the bug reports (not here).