Spotlight integration?

[Pinolo]

I'm wondering if it's something wrong I did or the feature is really missing from YummyFTP: is anyone able to use Spotlight to access YummyFTP's bookmarks?

[JD]

There is no spotlight importer for Yummy Bookmarks that would allow this.  Is this something that others think would be valuable?

[Pinolo]

To me it would be very much appreciated. Hope to hear the same from other users.

[paulc]

Hate to be a spoil sport, but I don't get it. If one had hundreds of Yummy bookmarks, perhaps there is a reason, but how many have more than half to a dozen?

Even going back in time when I was a serious ftp hound, about all I had were maybe 30 or so. Of which I rarely connected much... and as I named them correctly, it was a simple matter to scroll through the list to find what I wanted (as in a GETFILE dialog).

[JD]

Well, that's my thinking too - I have a lot of Bookmarks, but I have never needed to use Spotlight to find one of them.

So maybe I'm missing something and my question should be:

For what reason do you need Spotlight support of Yummy FTP Bookmarks?

[Pinolo]

Sorry for not being clear enough before. No, my problem isn't finding bookmark but *opening* them via Spotlight. I use Spotlight everyday to find documents, but also as an application launcher

[netnothing]

Just have to chime in to say, I understand the original posters question, and I think it would be cool if you were able to located and launch a bookmark directly from Spotlight.

For example, I support a bunch of clients websites remotely from my Mac.  Most are on *nix servers which have SSH capabilities.  What I did was create a bunch of bash scripts in a folder on my drive that simply allows me to login via ssh in terminal to the clients site.  I name them all goclientname. 

So no matter where I am on my system, I don't have to open terminal, I just hit Cmd + Space and type goclientname, and up pops terminal with the client connection open.

This ability with Yummy FTP would be cool to have....not earth shattering, but cool.

-Kevin

[JD]

Interesting

The only reason they don't show up is because Spotlight doesn't look everywhere on your Mac - it won't look inside many places, such your Preferences folder ... and that's where the Yummy FTP Bookmarks are located.

[netnothing]

Interesting, as I just copied a bookmark to my home folder and sure enough, spotlight found it and I was able to press return from a spotlight search and up popped Yummy FTP with the ftp window (actually is took me to the space I have Yummy assigned to)   

Ever since moving to the Mac, I've become very sensitive to the Mac OS X structure of things, and I appreciate it.  So Jason, I understand why you are storing the bookmarks where you do, it's where things like that are supposed to be stored.  I hate apps that clutter areas of my home folder where they shouldn't.

Wonder if there would be a way of giving a preference, like, Make my bookmarks searchable, that would copy the bookmarks to somewhere in the user folder.  Obviously optional for people who don't want to.  Would it be a pain to maintain the copies?  Maybe rewrite them everytime a bookmark is updated?

I know for example, Microsoft Entourage, in order to be indexed by Spotlight, has to copy out messages to an area that is indexed.  It looks like it copies messages to:

~/Library/Caches/Metadata/Microsoft

Maybe that location is an option?

Just my 2 cents.

-Kevin

[JD]

I will investigate

[netnothing]

I will investigate

You Rock JD!   

-Kevin

[Pinolo]

Thanks JD for being curious and responsive about the issue.
As additional info after netnothing's experience, neither symlinks or aliases trick Spotlight: you have to make a full copy of the bookmarks in a "public" place in order to have them indexed.

[JD]

It seems that the only way to get this to work would be to store Yummy's Bookmarks in ~/Library/Metadata instead of the Preferences folder. It could be done, I guess, but it doesn't feel right.

As an alternative for a quick-launching you might consider dragging the Yummy Bookmarks folder to your Dock - now you have a nice Leopard Stack of Bookmarks. For Tiger and Panther users you'll get a menu popup listing the Bookmarks.

[netnothing]

Maybe what I'll do is setup a quick shell script in cron to copy the folder, once a day maybe, to the cache folder.  Maybe I'll use rsync to only copy changes so that they don't get continuously backed up with Time Machine.

Thanks for looking JD.

-Kevin

[netnothing]

First off, thanks Pinolo for starting this thread.  I actually never thought about doing this until now.

So I'm testing using rsync to copy these to the Cache/Metadata folder.  Here's what I did:

- Created a folder called Yummy FTP in /Users/kevin/Library/Caches/Metadata/

Next, my rsync command is as follows:

Code:

rsync -aEvp --delete '/Users/kevin/Library/Preferences/Yummy FTP/Bookmarks' '/Users/kevin/Library/Caches/Metadata/Yummy FTP/'

This will create the Bookmarks directory within /Users/kevin/Library/Caches/Metadata/Yummy FTP
This will copy all the bookmarks, including resource forks
This will maintain permissions
This will delete any entries that I have removed from Yummy FTP
This will only copy files that are changed

Now I see where the bookmark files created by Yummy contain a lot of other metadata, which means they just accessing a site from a bookmark will update the file.  That means that rsync will see this as a change and copy the file over.  These files are tiny for me (around 16 KB), so I don't really see a huge issue with Time Machine backing them up.

Anyone have any suggestions on improving this?  Does my rsync command look right (I'm a little rusty with rsync  )

If this looks good, I may just add this to cron to run once a day.  I'd look into launchd instead, but it scares me   

-Kevin