linkaGoGo Organizer Beta released

Yesterday made the beta of linkaGoGo Organizer available. This link opens a new window with the application. It runs as an applet and therefore requires a Java plug-in installed in your browser. Most browsers have the Java plug-in already installed. If not check out the “Getting Started” section on the linkaGoGo Organizer help page.

For those who have not read earlier posts on linkaGoGo Organizer, it is an Organizer for your linkaGoGo bookmarks. It allows you to create, retrieve, update and delete your linkaGoGo bookmarks and folders through a familiar Windows Explorer-like interface. It automatically picks up the linkaGoGo signed-in user from the browser and also selects the color theme based on your linkaGoGo Color theme.

The beta runs through end of January 2006. After that it will then become part of the Plus subscription package (Only $3.95 a year, not month). Some features such SSL support (available now), Channels (available soon) will require the appropriate Premium option.

The coolest feature (Call it developer’s pride) I think is that you can launch two or more windows, so updates in one window automatically reflect in other windows. Also when you do a cut of bookmarks or folders in one window you can paste them in the other window. This makes folder reorganizations much more convenient.

GoGolian

LinkaGoGo and REST API progress V

It took some time, but finally I added HTTP Digest authentication to the linkaGoGo Web API. With Digest authentication your password is not send over the Internet and so it is in that sense more secure. I also implemented a timeout, so once authenticated, the authentication only lasts a day maximum. For more info see the HTTP Authentication specification RFC 2617

Looking at the server logs it seems that the uptake for the Web API is a little slow. There is no one seriously using it yet. I hope it is the silence for the storm. If there is anything you need, such as samples, features or documentation let me know.

Well soon I’ll have the linkaGoGo Organizer application available (See screenshot), it relies heavily on the API and has already support for the new Digest authentication. Besides features such as create, retrieve, update and delete of folders and bookmarks it also supports the linkaGoGo color themes. It launches as a pop-up application (no download) and doesn’t require you to login. I added another bonus feature that I’ll reveal after the launch.

GoGolian

Don’t take my folders away

Today (after the delicious turkey) ran across an interesting article on the Keeping Found Things Found™ website. This website is a Research project of the Information School at the University of Washington. Btw I came back to the site thanks to the linkaGoGo reminders. (see tip 2)

The article is called: “Don’t take my folders away! Organizing personal information to get things done.” It describes the results of a study on the way people organize information in support of projects.

Key findings are that people will not trust “Google” like searches alone. People don’t have trust in searches; they use folders to get control of their information items and to understand the relationship between folder items.

The article also describes a number of enhancements required for folders. Improvements suggested are to support ordering of folders, current use vs. later use and re-use of folder structures.

The article concludes that ‘search’ is likely to remain a second choice to incremental stepwise methods of re-access (foldering) for finding personal information. This conclusion is very much in line with what I described in an earlier post “Organize your bookmarks by Folders or by Tags?”

GoGolian

New "Safari Bookshelf" online book service

Yesterday signed up for the O’Reilly Safari Bookshelf online book service. For those who don’t know O’Reilly, it is a technical book publisher known for their books with the funky animals on the cover.

The model is very similar to Netflix. But instead of renting DVD’s that physically get mailed to your house address, you have online access to 10 books at a time (called a bookshelf). You can read and search them online, copy sample code and with certain subscriptions even download parts of the books.

Once you added a book to your bookshelf it has to stay there for 30 days. After 30 days you can replace it with another book. Subscription prices start at $10,- a month for a bookshelf of 5 books and go up depending on the size and amount of bookshelves you want. They now have a 14-day free trial to check it out. Oh, and you get 30% discount when you decide to buy the actual book.

For me this is a great service, as it allows me to quickly read up on a particular topic, without spending a fortune. If I look at my own technical book library it is full with books covering outdated technology and there are only a few books, I keep using on a regular basis.

GoGolian

Tips & Tricks 2, linkaGoGo reminder toolbars

In the previous 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 called 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 is 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 many 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 set it to 15. Now click on the OK button to save the changes and tpo go 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

Organize your bookmarks by Folders or by Tags?

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 I removed it. So without touching the existing features, I will bring enable Keyword navigation on the website. May I’ll experiment with some interactive development where I will make a first cut available for you to play with and then refine it on the feedback I get. With the Keyword browser linkaGoGo can do both worlds and even go between them. Within the context of Keyword look at available Folders or within a Folder context look at the available Keywords.

GoGolian

P.S.
The folder dilemma of where to store a bookmark when more then one folder applies has been resolved in linkaGoGo, as it allows a bookmark to be stored in multiple folders.

LinkaGoGo and REST api progress IV

Yeah!!!

Today made the beta to the linkaGoGo REST API available. Writing the documentation was almost ( more work then writing the API itself.

The API allows quering of folders and bookmarks, creation, updating and deleting of bookmarks and folders.

It also provides features such as:

• Authentication, (Basic HTTP authentication for now).


• Compression, allows faster page downloads.


• 128 bits HTTPS support for extra security.

We will add more features soon. Such as API access to your channels, you know them from the toolbars: reminders, most used, recent etc. and more.

If you write an application/plugin against the API you can showcase it on our website. See the documentation page for details.

If you have any comments on the documentation or the API itself send an email to support@linkagogo.com

Note on the documentation page you can find a sneak preview of linkaGoGo Organizer that was mentioned on this blog before.

GoGolian

LinkaGoGo and REST api progress III

Having done (earlier post) the REST api methods for create, retrieve, update and delete (CRUD) for both folders and bookmarks, and an API to retrieve the contents of a folder, I felt was close to done. Well not really.

Since then updated the client application linkaGoGo Organizer to support all these methods. Still missing here are the Cut and Paste operations, to move bookmarks and folders from one folder to another.

The REST API itself was updated to support authentication (to prevent people mocking around with other member’s folders) using the HTTP Basic authentication. Will add Digest authentication in a later release.

Also added HTTP 1.1 compression support, so if a client supports this, the amount of traffic between the server and the client can be dramatically reduced. Measured shrinking upto 17% of the original size for the contents of a root folder. This is the same trick I use for the linkaGoGo turbo mode. Companies like NetZero use this feature to increase the download speed of their dialup connections.

Already had requests to beta-test the REST API. Hopefully will make the first release available this week.

GoGolian

linkaGoGo talks “del.icio.us”

Today added support for exporting linkaGoGo bookmarks in the del.icio.us format.

Del.icio.us is currently probably the most well-known online bookmark manager. In my opinion its success was based on its use of tags (linkaGoGo calls them keywords) and that by default all the bookmarks are shared and available for others to see them, so people can see (lurk) what other people bookmark.

I wonder how people use del.icio.us? Do people use it as an online bookmark manager or merely as a tool to discover new websites and post interesting sites?

As on online bookmark manager it seems there are two ways to navigate to a particular bookmark, one is by when the bookmarks are posted. It shows a list of the most recently added bookmarks. The other is by navigating through tags.

Long time ago linkaGoGo allowed navigation by keywords, but personally I never used it and removed it. No one complained then. The use of keywords to automatically organize bookmarks was actually my “Eureka” to start a bookmark manager. See here how linkaGoGo Keywords page looked like in May 2001 on the Internet Archive (note the great graphic).

I have been thinking a couple of times on how to re-introduce that original idea but then in a more practical form. One is a typical linkaGoGo toolbar based on a tag. Also I got some requests to allow RSS feeds based on tags. But I think there should be a way to automatically create a folder-like tree based on the bookmarks and their keywords. I wrote a prototype once but always stumbled on the amount of tags at the first level of the tree. Only when I added an index in front of the first level of tags it was usable. It would look like this:

A
+ Applications
..+ Desktop
..+ Web
B
+ Bookmarks
etc

A bookmark with the keywords Applications, Web and Bookmarks would then appear under more then one branch of the tree. In Applications, in Applications/Web and in Bookmarks.

So the web application that can read the del.icio.us format is called RawSugar. It seems to provide very similar functionality as del.icio.us and his a nifty way to reorganize tags.
Have fun trying out the site. Note before uploading your bookmarks. All of your bookmarks are automatically viewable by others, so be careful.

GoGolian

linkaGoGo and REST api progress II

Earlier in this blog I reported that I was working on a web API to linkaGoGo, based on the principles of REST.

In the last few days made some more progress on it. Last time I reported that I implemented the creation of bookmarks and folders (HTTP Post), and before that the deletion of them (HTTP Delete). Since then added support for updating of bookmark (HTTP Put).

With this functionality you can write your own bookmark manager against linkaGoGo. By writing a program in Java, C#, Javascript (Ajax), Perl, Python, Firefox plugin or whatever your latest programming language of choice is, you will be able to retrieve your linkaGoGo Bookmarks and Folders, and be able to Create, Update or Delete them.

And if you are not a developer I will make this functionality available through ‘linkaGoGo Organizer’, a browser plug-in bookmark manager.

Before making this available as a beta, will still need to add security (so only you can access your bookmarks), compression (to optimize the transfers) and finalize the ‘linkaGoGo Organizer’.

Let me know if you already see purposes for this API, or if you have additional requirements.

GoGolian