links for 2006-02-28
-
Free tool that creates ISO files out of directories. Also includes a command line version of the utility.
February 28, 2006
February 27, 2006
links for 2006-02-27
-
A site similar to TinyURL but that allows you to create human readable urls that have contextual meaning.
February 25, 2006
links for 2006-02-25
-
How to make an ipod cover that looks like Domokun! Kawaii!
-
A website that compiles links to free patterns and reviews of Japanese crafting books. Definitely a good resource for info discovery on Japanese crafts.
-
Can’t paint the boring walls in your apartment? Defy your apartment manager’s self-expression squashing rules and dress them up with construction paper murals full of your personality. Link to tutorial at the bottom of the page.
-
How to make that stuff on the commercials for about 95% less than it costs to buy it.
-
A tutorial on how to make a laptop bag out of antistatic mats and neoprene. Interesting design, and doesn’t look TOO hard.
-
Create wall art by putting the entire text of a book into shapes you design and printing it out. Cool idea.
-
Cool site that has tutorial on using recyclable materials to make some new cool stuff. The soda bottle lamp looks awesome, and there are some cute projects with milk cartons (too bad I don’t drink milk!).
February 24, 2006
links for 2006-02-24
-
Love this idea!! Now I have something to do with those old computer programming books that no one wants anymore (including the public library) that are sitting on my shelf… and be able to store my cds on my bookshelf! Very cool!
-
3 extremely useful mods you can make to your moleskine (or any other non-spiral) notebook: a pen/pencil holder, postit tabs and pencil sharpener. Great ideas
-
Cute idea… use a paperback book as an ipod case.
-
Very cool idea… use the Make-a-Flake site to create customized flakes (like a person’s name) and then use the image it generates in Photoshop (or Illustrator) to create custom wrapping paper or other personalized crafts… neato.
-
Build an interesting bookcase out of inexpensive materials quickly… Cool design… might be useful for some other projects on a smaller scale.
-
A simple but different type of bookmark you can make. This site has a downloadble template to print out and cut them out, but the idea itself is the key. Use them to mark chapters in books for school or keep notes on them as you read…
-
Tutorial on how to make an nteresting papercraft book that each page unfolds into a square. Not sure what to actually do with it once it’s made but it’s ripe with possibilities.
-
Cool perspective art from Felice Varini. Rooms that are painted so that from a particular spot, things seem to “float” in the air.
-
Chalk pavement art that, when viewed from the right perspective looks 3 dimensional. Awesome stuff…
-
An online version of PowerPoint… one of the latest additions to the “Office Web 2.0″
February 22, 2006
links for 2006-02-22
-
Podcasting/audio/video hosting service with reasonable pricing plans for people who want to distribute their audio/video files.
-
A service that creates feeds for audio files that you can use to share with friends, family or the world. It doesn’t host your files but allows you to create channels for podcasts and such.
-
Site with ratings of the stuff you see on TV. Just in case you’re really tempted to order…
February 21, 2006
links for 2006-02-21
-
From TechCrunch: “a search engine for airline tickets that will change the way we all travel. Purchasing flights purely based on price has been around for a while, but the consumer has never had the power to quickly and at a glance evaluate the cheapest d
-
Tutorial on how to make your own projection screen “tv” with a slide projector and cannabilized LCD screen.
-
More truth in fiction. Ahh the life of a tech professional.
-
A site about to be in beta which claims to help you organize and share your email, files, IM conversations, task lists, etc. Might be useful for the project I’m working on but doesn’t look like there’s a way to set up a database with custom data… still
-
A couple of WordPress plugins to download and check out… one which I really need… an alternative way to include tags that are variations of the tags that you typically use as standards, specifically so that you can still hook into technorati without c
-
Something to check out for MacroLinz… traffic sharing service.
-
Parallel Path Electromagnetic Motors — A revolution in motion? - ( OSEN ) Open Source Energy NetworkUmmm… woah??? I’ve seen so many things like this come and go that it’s hard to believe one can be taken seriously, but one can always hope. If Boeing is interested, that’s a good sign.
-
Design your own parts and have them built and mailed to you… interesting possibilities here. May have to try this out!!
February 18, 2006
links for 2006-02-18
-
Free online Office-like tools: Excel, PowerPoint and Word clones as Java apps. Useful for doing stuff on the Mac or a Linux box. Also allows export to PDF.
February 17, 2006
Building a better link trap
I’m on an informatics kick lately. I’m working on a new PIM system that I’ll proably blog about soon but I’ve also been thinking about bookmarking. I am a compulsive bookmarker. I save almost everything. And most of the time I save it more than once depending on what it is because there’s not a single bookmark service that provides everything that I need. So I’m going to ask for one today!
If you’re a developer out there that wants an idea to work on to build the better bookmarking site, this post is for you!! If you’re a bookmarking service user like me, and you have suggestions for features that I didn’t ask for, please leave a comment! Hopefully someone will take a hint and build the ulitimate bookmark service and everyone will be so happy that all the world’s problems will be solved and we’ll live in peace forever after. Well, maybe not. But a better service would be nice.
The Basics
Listed to avoid forgetting the obvious, these are features/abilities that already exist in many if not all of the services out there right now.
- Save a URL with a title and description (duh!)
- Tags may be associated with the bookmark (hierarcy is dead!)
- A page listing all my bookmarks in archive
- Filter my own archive by my tags
- Search my bookmarks by description text and tags
- A page that ranks bookmarks by popularity
- A page that lists the latest public bookmarks
- Subscribe to my archive by RSS
The Not-So-Basics
These are abilities and features that are either not as common, or that I’ve seen in some services but not others. Here’s where some differentiation begins.
- Store private bookmarks
- Store a copy of the page privately so that if the site goes away you have a personal copy of the info
- Store parts of a page instead of or as a supplement to the whole page: to clip parts of a page
- When saving a bookmark, choose whether to store a copy, the clip, just the url or any combination of the three.
- Store optional keywords. These differ from tags in that they have words or phrases that are specific to that single bookmark to help you find it later. If you’re a tagger and you have hundreds of tags that you’ve only used 1 or 2 times, those are really keywords. Having keywords would help us unclutter our tag clouds. Tags are for generalization and classification, keywords are for uniqueness.
- The save post page should have an easy alternative to typing for me to be able to add tags to my post, a suggestion feature maybe, clickable tag list
- Search on text in your saved copies (full text search of the bookmarks, in other words)
- Limit the scope on your searches to entire user base, just personal, and search “within” a tag
- A public API to write programs to manipulate my archive
- Subscribe by RSS to any and all bookmark lists (mine, tag filter, searches, popular, latest, etc).
- A way to easily “copy” a bookmark on any page of the service site to my own archive
- A page with “suggested” bookmarks based on bookmarks that I already have that people who bookmark the same things as me have bookmarked that I haven’t
- A page with a list users who bookmark a lot of the same things that I do as a suggestion to subscribe to them because we have common interests
- Export my archive in an XML format that contains ALL the data that is in my archive
- Export my saved pages in a zipped format
- Sort my archive listing by Date or Title (alpha), or by the domain of the url.
- Create “groups” of users to share/suggest bookmarks with
- Subscribe to another user’s bookmarks
- Subscribe to tags
- View a bookmark’s history (other subscribers and their comments)
- Other users may comment on my bookmarks
- View all comments and descriptions for a bookmark/url (mine and other people’s) on one page
- Create topic lists/directories of bookmarks that others can add to and comment on. Different from groups of users…
- Rate my bookmarks
The Killer Features
Here’s where your new service will stand out from the pack (and it’s a large pack!)… These features are either rare or I have never seen anywhere. Offer these and you will have the edge on all the other services out there.
- Storing copies of the IMAGES from a bookmarked page! This is my number 1, absolute need to have requirement for a bookmarking service that I have only seen one place offer and it was a personal storage site, not a bookmarking service. Services that currently store copies of pages only store the HTML. I NEED THIS!! There’s no other way to preserve picture tutorials and inspirational website design type pages.
- When storing a bookmark to the first page in a series, a way to easily associate the rest of the pages in that series with the original bookmark (instead of necessarily creating a new bookmark for each page in the series). Saved copies should include the whole series, and the link should only show up once listed in my archive even though it points to multiple pages
- Enter markup into the description field: to be able to add links and lists in HTML format to the description
- Search by root url. If you want to see all the links you have for cnn.com, for example.
- A page for a bookmark to view my rating, the average rating of the same url for the people in my user groups, and the average rating of all ratings for the same url across the entire user base
- Create personal notes. This would just be a convenience, basically a bookmark post without a url, but something you can add a title and tags to.
- Create a native post automatically on my blog with the items that I have bookmarked that day
- Create a native post on my blog for every bookmark I save with a tag that I specify (allowing me to choose what items get posted to my blog instead of just the full day’s posting)
- Filter my bookmarks with tag queries (AND/OR/NOT/Like)
- Choose what delimiter I want to use when typing in tags: if I like space delimiters, or commas or semi colons, or whatever… or just have the UI be smart enough to parse them however I enter them as long as I am consistent with what I use
- Meta tag my tags. I want to be able to set up tags to be for source, object type, for, action, etc. Not sure how to do this easily, but it’s my wishlist so I can ask for it anyway
- Allow linking to files and resources other than web files, such as files on my computer, so that I can add descriptions and tags to these files and find them easily (these bookmarks would automatically be private since they’d only work if you were on that computer)
Anyone got any other great ideas? I’ll update this list as people suggest things that I like! And if someone out there decides to build this PLEASE, for goodness sake, let me be an alpha/beta tester!!
links for 2006-02-17
-
Neato… fun idea! These things are so cheap now that there’s lots of cool possibilites…
-
The next to last post on this page has the solution I’ve been looking for… forces you to the login page if you’re not already logged in, so you never see any page on the site unless you’re logged in. Yay!
-
One more thing to prove the OS will soon be irrelavent.
Ma.gnolia and the hunt for a better bookmarking site
I have spent much time and looking for the perfect (at least for me) online bookmark archive and I still haven’t found it.
I received a beta invite to Ma.gnolia a few weeks ago and tried it out. My initial response was the same as Pete’s:
“So yes, it’s a good effort - but also a completely unimaginative one. ”
Ma.gnolia just doesn’t offer (at least yet) a lot to compel me to switch from the two main services that I already use the most (Del.icio.us and Furl).
But maybe there is some hope for Ma.gnolia.
Since I already know what I’m looking for in a bookmarking site, it didn’t take that long for me to check for some things and then send their tech support a pretty long email with questions and suggestions. A representative named Todd replied and his response was friendly. He seemd to genuinely appreciate the feedback and sounded like their team might actually take some of my recommendations into consideration. We’ll have to wait and see. I’m not ready to make the move yet until I see some innovation.
Ma.gnolia reminds me of Furl with tags instead of “topics” (folders). I give them major props for saving a private copy of the pages you bookmark, but that seems to be the main feature it offers that other services don’t (besides Furl and Clipmarks).
It’s not really designed for info-discovery, which is what Del.icio.us does a good job with. I think some of those info-discovery features are there, but they’re not promoted very well:
- The “latest” and “popular” lists of incoming links are in the sidebar on your main archive, under the space hogging “add a link” box (that should be less prominent because 99% of the time you’ll add links with the bookmarklet), and shown in small fonts, so I didn’t even see them until the second time I came to the site. There needs to be a separate space, a whole page with the ability to see older items as well, devoted to these things because they’re important… they’re not sidebar items.
- You can use a url to see a list of links under a tag and even a combination of tags like you can with del.icio.us (ex: http://ma.gnolia.com/tag/css+design) but nowhere on the site did I find information telling you that feature is available… I just tried it and it worked.
- They have a “group” feature that is relatively unique but no way to browse a list of all groups… you have to use the search and hope that you typed the right keyword.
- They have search, but no way to specify what kind of search… it searches everyone’s links… what if I am just searching in my own archive?
And my other beef (after asking in email) is that they aren’t planning on offering a browser toolbar like Furl (which is nice because it has a search bar right on it) or Clipmarks (which lets you choose parts of the page to save). The explanation was that toolbars aren’t available to everyone and they are often targets for hacks and exploits. While that may be true, they are also potentially incredibly useful depending on what you do with them and would be another thing to make Ma.gnolia’s service stand out from the pack. As for the bookmarklet that’s available to capture bookmarklets, there’s no innovation there either. You get can’t even really be put in a pop-up window like I prefer because the page isn’t laid out compactly so you have to scroll a lot to get to the entry fields and tags.
It’s unfortunate since I was really hoping there’d be more to set Ma.gnolia apart. Maybe now that they’re getting beta feedback their developers will try to add some more innovative features instead of just trying to depend on the fact that their site looks nice to entice people in. I’ll keep watching and hope it will continue to evolve.
February 16, 2006
links for 2006-02-16
-
The first of 5 parts of an article on how Mr. Hesch used WordPress to set up his own PIM. I was thinking about doing this and found his article. Now I am for sure. This will solve a lot of problems, I think.
-
A service that allows you to sign up for RSS feeds to be delivered by mail. Similar to R|Mail.
February 15, 2006
links for 2006-02-15
-
Handy reference for writing batch files.
-
There is much much much much truth in fiction.
-
An ambigious beta site… Looks like a way to either discover experts or keep up with your contacts… We’ll have to wait and see.
-
A photobook printing service with a software download that you use to compose your books. Looks similar to MyPublisher.com. Pricing for books is similar though it seems to have more “themes”, backgrounds and other “scrapbooking” type clipart you can use