Friday, September 24, 2010

GoGo Search

As expected from any self-respecting website linkaGoGo provides a search feature that in the linkaGoGo case allows you to search your bookmarks and folders.

You can access this Search feature from the LinkaGoGo Search menu, by adding the Search Toolbar to one of you linkaGoGo toolbars or by installing (see Add-ons page) it in your browser’s built-in Search feature.

This standard search feature follows the traditional “enter your keyword(s)”, hit enter or click a button and a new results page appears. GoGo Search is different in two ways: First it doesn’t require you to complete your keyword, but if you hesitate typing a little then without hitting an ‘Enter’ key or pressing a ‘Go’ button the results start appearing and if there are to many results you can continue to refine your search by continuing to type. Second the results do not appear on a new page but appear “inline” in your current linkaGoGo page and disappear when you clear the search query. This gives a much more immediate effect, hence the name GoGo Search.

GoGo Search does not have its own menu tab but it is available as a toolbar. And as GoGo Search is part of the Plus subscription it is not in your default linkaGoGo setup. You will need to add it to your Toolbars. You can do this through Options/Toolbars then from the list of Toolbars choose the ‘GoGo Search’ toolbar. In my setup I actually replaced the default linkaGoGo Search toolbar with the ‘GoGo Search’ toolbar. And once you do, you will never want to go back.

GoGolian

Sunday, September 19, 2010

LinkaGoGo's most powerful feature: Reminders

Here another repost, this was a tips and tricks post about one of linkaGoGo's most powerful features: reminders.

In an earlier post I talked about how I used a combination of folders and keyword/tag-searches to get to the bookmark that I need. However in my linkaGoGo setup in most cases linkaGoGo already has the bookmark that I need right on its Home page waiting for me. Thanks to the magic of the linkaGoGo toolbars.

LinkaGoGo toolbars are lists of bookmarks that appear on your linkaGoGo Home page. You can compare them with the Internet Explorer and Firefox links toolbar. You can put your most used bookmarks on this browser links toolbar, so they are right there to click on.

LinkaGoGo not only provides a toolbar where you can put your most used bookmarks yourself (the “Favorites toolbar”), but also provides toolbars with dynamic lists of bookmarks, such a toolbar that shows your most frequently visited bookmarks. As chances are you most likely want to visit these bookmarks again. And if not that bookmark will slowly disappear in oblivion, as they are displaced by more frequently visited bookmarks. Other types of toolbars include toolbars based on a keywords (tags), the contents of a folder or an RSS feed (similar to the Firefox Live bookmarks). In total there are 24 different types of toolbars. You can find and configure them under Options / Toolbars.

Today’s Tip is about a special kind of toolbar, the reminder toolbars. You must all have online newspapers, weekly/monthly magazines, blogs, websites you want to monitor on a regular basis. Examples I have are the The New York Times, The Telegraaf (Dutch newspaper), the Google Adsense website, Slashdot, the Usage Statistics for linkaGoGo, the Hot Deal club, all sites that I visit on a daily basis, once I visit them that day I normally don’t visit them until the next day. Other sites I have are Nielsen’s alertbox, PC world, PC Magazine, some Newspaper Columns, which a visit on a weekly basis. And I also have sites I visit on a monthly basis. Some sites I just visit once in a while, to check back, these are most of the time websites that are not often updated.

Here comes the reminder toolbar into play. The reminder toolbar displays the websites that you wanted to be reminded of on a particular day, once you clicked on it from the toolbar it disappears from the reminder toolbar until it is time to visit it again. So for example my New York Times bookmark appears every morning when I start up linkaGoGo in my reminder toolbar, I check out the site, sip some coffee read the news and when I go back to the linkaGoGo page, it disappeared to reappear the next morning. I might as well have the reminder toolbar, the website-visit-to-do list.

So how do you set this up? First you start by setting up reminders on some of your bookmarks. Think of a website you visit every day, now look it up in linkaGoGo and Edit its properties (Hover over the bookmark for a second or two and a menu will appear then click Edit, or click on the Edit menu and click the little pencil behind the bookmark). On the Edit page look for the ‘Reminder me’ property, by default it says ‘Never’. Click on the drop down and you can choose: daily, a particular day in the week, a particular day in the month or after a specified number of days. With the later choice you also have to indicate after how many days you want to be reminded again. Choose say ‘Daily’ and click OK. Now if you already visited that website that day it will not show in the reminder toolbar yet, until the next day. Do this for all your bookmarks that you visit on a regular basis and think of when you want to be reminded of them.

After you have set this up you are almost there, the only thing to do it to display the reminder toolbar. To do this go the Options page and find the toolbars tab. Decide if you want a Horizontal (appear on the top of the screen) or a Vertical one (appear on the left of the screen). For now pick Horizontal. Then choose the kind of reminder toolbar (it is like ordering a meal in a restaurant, choices, choices, choices.), there are 5 reminder toolbars one for each kind of reminder and one that displays all reminders. The last one is my favorite. Then modify the label if needed. Then choose how many entries you want to display on the screen and how may in a drop down list. Choose ‘6’ as the toolbar entries and ‘All’ in the Pull down entries. This should keep everything nicely on one line. Leave the numbers of characters to display at 20, if you have a small screen you can choose it to 15. Now click on the OK button to save the changes and bring us back to the Home page.

And voila, there appears a list of your reminders. Now every morning when you are still a little slow and just took that first sip of hot coffee, you don’t have to think what website to visit next, reminders already has them waiting for you.

Enjoy,
GoGolian

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

IPhone development without Mac, Objective-C, Cocoa and Apple app store

Read this great book on (web) app development for the IPhone. And it rekindled my appetite for developing for the IPhone.

I had done some attempts to develop a native application for the IPhone platform. And it should be doable as hundreds of thousands of developers have done it before me. But I spend way too much time setting up my development environment to finally be able to do a simple app. Let alone learning the development platform. Then it all felt very proprietary, So I left it there, to perhaps coming back to it in some point in the future....

Then I read "Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript" by Jason Stark. Within no time I was developing IPhone apps with the technologies I know and love.

So expect something soon...

GoGolian


linkaGoGo now Twitter

You can follow linkaGoGo now on Twitter

GoGolian

Frequently asked linkaGoGo questions


Here a post from 2006 about the new FAQ. This has been a tremendous success, it cut down the amount of support questions significantly.

After over 5 years of linkaGoGo support, I finally decided to create a linkaGoGo Frequently Asked Questions page. As some of the questions were definitely frequent.

So here are the top three of frequently asked questions:

1)      I continually get logged out, how can I fix this?
2)      How do I remove my account? This question definitely became more frequent when we started sending out reminders when people’s trial was about to expire and we asked if they wanted to buy a subscription or stick to the free Basic subscription.
3)      How do I change my email address?

So the answers to these and six other frequent questions can now be found on the official linkaGoGo FAQ.

You can access the FAQ from the Help menu and the Contact Us page.

GoGolian

Monday, September 13, 2010

Keywords = Tags

Here a post on I did earlier in November 2005 about the then  new Tag hype.


I have done both for years in linkaGoGo. In linkaGoGo tags are just called keywords. So from a linkaGoGo perspective:

Keywords = Tags


I use folders to give a bookmark a location where I can quickly navigate. For example all my banking links are in the Finance folder. I do that because folders provide a quick way to navigate to something as long as you remember where you stored it. In that case the  bookmark is only one or two clicks away.

That is if I remember where I stored it. If I don’t remember what folder I stored it in, I fall back to searching. When doing a search, the keywords come into play, you would type a keyword like ‘bank’ and all bookmarks tagged with that keyword will show up. Most of the time the bookmark I was looking for shows up.

Note the above scenario describes a situation where I know what bookmark I would like to use. If I don’t know what specific bookmark I want to use, for example when I’m researching a topic about XML, I would search on XML in linkaGoGo. Then from the result list I start surfing. Also I can try to find a folder called XML. In general I do know what folders I have on linkaGoGo.

In the example above I use the Folders to navigate to something, either a particular bookmark or a folder about a topic. I use the keywords, as a fallback mechanism, in a search. Which means typing, which in my case is most of the times slower then 2 mouse-clicks. If I had a mechanism to quickly navigate my keywords with my mouse then things would get interesting.

On other sites I have seen a number of solutions for navigation tags. I have seen a list of all tags. With 585 unique keywords for my bookmarks that is not handy. The variation on the list used by Flickr and Technorati is showing tags with more links in a larger font. Another option, I have seen is displaying the 20 Tags with the most bookmarks, which is not useful, as it needs to be complete list. I do like the del.icio.us approach where after clicking a tag and new list of tags appears which is based on the bookmarks for the main tag.

So basically the feature linkaGoGo is missing is a good keyword (tag) browser to navigate your keywords. linkaGoGo used to have one before the whole tag hype started, but was not implemented in such a way that it was useful, so removed it. So without touching the existing features will bring Keyword navigation to site. May I’ll experiment with some interactive development where I will make a first cut available to play with and then refine it on feedback. With the Keyword browser linkaGoGo can do both worlds and even go across between them. Within the context of Keyword look at available folders or within a Folder context look at the available tags.

GoGolian

Sunday, September 12, 2010

GoGolian is back

I'm back!!!

I hadn't had a chance to move my GoGolian blog after blogger removed their FTP support, were GoGolian was hosted. Unfortunately my old posts were never moved. My own fault I missed the migration deadline. Anyway glad to be back. Over the next few days will repost some of the old posts which I think should still be appropriate.

For those who don't know GoGolian. I am the owner and developer of the linkaGoGo bookmarking website. I started linkaGoGo in 2001 and with some ups and downs is still going strong.

GoGolian