Gogolian's hurt feelings

Today updated linkaGoGo with some smallish improvements. This was based on feedback I got from members and ex-members.

Recently got a very nasty email of someone who had signed up for linkaGoGo a while back. He got some of the reminder emails that indicated that his Trial account was to expire. He wasn’t happy with these emails cluttering his inbox, even after I explained on how you can remove your account. LinkaGoGo was accused of being totally incomprehensible (which is subjective, so I can’t argue with that) and that we were a pirate website and should be banned from the Internet. Now that part did hurt a little.

Anyway decided from now on only send two reminder emails, instead of the four I used to, which I agree was a little of the top. And in the email include a link, that when clicked will stop linkaGoGo from sending any more reminders or backup emails.

Other improvements are more functional such as a link when adding a bookmark you already have to the Edit page for the bookmark when the duplicate bookmark is displayed.

Another improvement allows you to remove a post from Society. This is useful when accidentally adding a bookmark and clicking the Post to Society.

Anyway it is good to get feedback and fortunately I can act on it relatively quickly, depending on the type of request. I do prefer the positive feedback though ;-)

GoGolian

Tips & Tricks 1, bookmark your (cd,dvd,book) collections

For those that are interested in linkaGoGo tips and tricks, I will regularly feature some in this blog.

This week is about documenting your collections online with linkaGoGo. So once in while talking to someone at work I wonder if I have a certain CD or what DVDs I own. Here a tip on always having this information at hand.

What I did for my music collection was create a 'My Music' folder in my linkaGoGo account. Then added subfolders for every artist and created bookmark for every album. The album bookmarks are really search links on Amazon and normally return information about the artist and album. I share the folder as a public folder, this will allow anyway to see my collection. You can find the link to my public folder here:

http://www.linkagogo.com/go/Members/gogolian/My Music

Now it is not entirely truth that I created the artist subfolders and album bookmarks myself. I actually wrote a little script that generated a bookmark file from my mp3 collection and imported that into my ‘My Music’ folder.

For my DVD collection I did something similar, I created a ‘My DVD’ folder and made bookmarks for all my DVD’s. The bookmarks point to the entry of the movie in the Internet Movie Database. The link to MY DVD database can be found here:

http://www.linkagogo.com/go/Members/gogolian/My DVD’s

Now the great thing about the linkaGoGo public Folders is that you can search them. So if you want for example to see all your U2 albums. In the ‘My Music’ folder type ‘U2’ in the search box, select the 'whole directory' checkbox and voila all my U2 albums

If you collect or want to archive others stuff like the books you own, you can apply the same technique. The book bookmarks can point to their Amazon entry. You can even sign up as an Amazon Associate and make some money from people who buy books, which they found on your ‘My Books’ Collection.

Hopefully you enjoyed this tip,

GoGolian

linkaGoGo and REST api progress

This weekend worked some more on the server-side of linkaGoGo Organizer. I implemented support for the creation of Folders and Bookmarks, using the HTTP POST command.

The server-side API will be a REST interface. REST stands for Representational State Transfer. Which is a terrible name; I always forget where it stands for. In a nutshell it states that computer programs should access/manipulate data stored on the web in the same way a user does with a browser. Every piece of data has a unique address and a computer should work on the data with the basic HTTP commands: GET, POST, PUT and DELETE. Some people map these operations to the SQL database operations: Select, Insert, Update and Delete.

If you like to learn more about REST, Joe Gregorio wrote a good article “How to Create a REST Protocol” which is available on XML.com

GoGolian

Self portrait with the help of a violin case

Decided to add a photo of myself to my profile on GoGolian. Turned out I really didn’t have any semi-formal photos, mug shots, of myself. So decided to make one. Since I was home alone had to make one with the camera’s self-timer. After a lot of very un-sharp attempts realized my camera was focusing when you click the start-timer button, instead of just before it takes the photo and are actually seated. So in the end put a violin case with a piece of cloth over it in front of the camera. Then after I pressed the self-timer, ran over to the couch and replaced the violin case with myself just in time before the photo is was taken.

GoGolian

Limited linkaGoGo access problems due to Apache setup

Yesterday some linkaGoGo members reported some access problems to the linkaGoGo website. That was probably caused by an incorrect Apache virtual host setup I created in hosting the GoGolian blog. The way I set it up caused all the traffic for linkaGoGo without the “www” prefix to go to GoGolian blog. Since Saturday night everything is working fine again.

GoGolian

Gave Flock a new browser a spin

So ran into Flock from a post on Slashdot. Flock is an open-source web browser created by a small team from California. It is still an early preview, but the features listed show a glimpse of where browsers will go in the next year. With built-in support for Blogging, Web-based bookmarks (del.icio.us only so far, more on this later), an integrated RSS reader and more stuff, it is already called the browser for WEB 2.0. Actually this post is made from Flock using the integrated blogging editor (Had some trouble publishing it though; long live the clipboard).

I'm especially delighted about the Favorites integration with an online bookmarking service. When using the Flock favorites you can choose to synchronize them with del.icio.us. This reminds me I got to hurry with my public web service API I have been working on. The question is will now every self respecting bookmark service implement a web service API. And will it have to look like the one provided by del.icio.us and become the de-facto standard or is there room for other API's.

Suddenly remembered again where the rules about blogging I referred to yesterday came from. It was from Jacob Nielsen's Alertbox. Jacob Nielsen runs a bi-weekly column on Web usability. His latest column was about Weblog Usability. According to Mr. Nielsen you need to put a photo of yourself on your blog, so you can build up trust with your readers, Well will need some decent sleep before I make that photo. Also gave GoGolian its own domain name http://www.gogolian.com, to prevent the amateuristic look. Unbelievable that the domain name was still available. Sometimes you have to be lucky. Remind to tell me the story on how I got to the name GoGolian.

Today linkaGoGo got another excellent review on FindApps. Especially praised our customer support. Thanks.

GoGolian

GoGolian starts blogging

Have been working on linkaGoGo for more then 4 years now. It has gotten quite extensive.

Started with a simple static html based page with my frequently used bookmarks. It now has almost 14.000 registered members that have collected more then 4.6 millions bookmarks.

So for the last 2 weeks worked on a Java-based Bookmark Organizer. The goal is to organize the bookmarks on linkaGoGo with alternative, a simple Windows Explorer like interface.

The working title for the product is, surprisingly: LinkaGoGo Organizer. Will see if I end up with a better name. Am open for suggestions.

Anyway will keep you posted on the project, today I added the server-side part for deleting folders and bookmarks using the HTTP delete command, was relatively simple to implement.

So this was my first post, kind of interesting, probably violated all the rules about writing a good blog, no own domain name etc for it, well might well get used to it, just as my klunky writing style. I blame it on English being my second language, but it is probably more laziness. If only there was a compiler that could fix writing style.


GoGolian