I had the same problem with Flickr a while back. I signed up and uploaded some photos, but then decided to host my own Coppermine gallery and that's been working just as well for me. Now I had to find a way to do this with bookmarks. That need led me to Sitebar, which has its own online service, but also has a downloadable bookmark app that you can host yourself. There's even a Firefox extension to integrate it right into the browser. I installed and set it up, imported my bookmarks, pointed the extension at it and voila, my bookmarks were now online. Then came the big snag--RSS feeds.

I've got nearly two hundred feeds and as far as I can tell, Sitebar doesn't offer any support for them. I'd click on the feed and get the raw XML file. Sigh...

I started looking at del.icio.us again. The only problem here was that the ability to import bookmarks had been disabled. I didn't really care about the social/taxononomy aspect of it all, I just wanted somewhere to keep and organize my bookmarks. I did like that it also integrated easily into Firefox via a simple extension. Ultimately, I decided that this would have to be my backup plan. I'd make it work somehow.

Then a friend sent me a link to a hacked-but-updated version of the Bookmarks Synchronizer extension. No new features, but just a compatibility update for Firefox 1.5 and a big sigh of relief. That's all I was ever looking for, so I installed it and everything's back to how I had it.

But...I've started to see the value of del.icio.us and have continued to use it for quick links and notes. That and I finally got around to organizing and cleaning out my bookmarks, many of which I haven't visited in years. Now, if there were just an extension that could verify bookmarks to see if the links still work...