Managing my mess of bookmarks (Part II) January 2, 2007

In a previous post I covered some nice extensions that sync your bookmarks across multiple computers. Now that I’m using Opera these days, those extensions aren’t of much use to me. This post is going to cover some decent online bookmarking solutions that I’ve been trying.

del.icio.us:  Among the ones I tried, this is probably what I’m least comfortable with (also its the most popular). On the good side, the interface is fast, neat and simple. Searching through tags is a breeze.

Now for the reasons why I chose not to use it any more: I just couldn’t stand the tags.
Gmail does tags perfectly: you predefine them, and then assign them to incoming mails. In del.icio.us, you can put any number of tags, irrespective of which ones you’ve used before. So is CuteOverload tagged under fun, funny, humor, cute, or humour? Arrgh! Maybe its just me, but I can’t stand an unorganised collection of anything.

Blinklist: This one’s like a prettier version of del.icio.us. Its got lots of nice features added on, such as a chat box in every user’s page. It looks like a friendly place, and the look-and-feel is very pleasant as well. One advantage it has that del.icio.us doesn’t, is that it auto-completes only within your existing tags when you’re blinking a site. As a result, I’m far more comfortable with the way my blinklist collection is tagged and organised.

Furl: This one is the BEST of the lot. I can’t imagine why it hasn’t got incredibly popular yet. As far as I’m concerned, Furl has this one feature that makes it invaluable: it archives a personal copy of every page you bookmark. With a feature like that, who needs tags! Since it also searches within the saved text, a simple search for, say, ’emacs’ shows every single page with that word in it. Who cares whether or not you remember to tag it ’emacs’, or whether or not that word exists in the title?

So there it is, I vote for Furl as the coolest online bookmarking tool around. Note that my main concern was just in saving and organising my bookmarks online. The social aspects aren’t that high a priority for me, so your opinions may differ.

Opera 9 is mind blowing December 9, 2006

I’ve been trying out Opera 9 the past few days, and I have to say I’m very impressed. Check out the size of the binaries in their website, its a meagre 5 MB file. The amount of features they’ve squeezed into that tiny size is just incredible. For starters.. its fast. Just for that one reason alone, I consider it worth the switch. Firefox struggles in my ageing comp, and I usually use Lynx or Dillo for a quick visit to the ‘net. Opera launches in a flash, in comparison.

 Features: Well, lets start with the in-built bittorrent client it has. Click on a torrent file and it gets launched automatically. Some config options are also available, so its a pretty useful feature for the lazy. And then there’s this very impressive mail client. It took me a couple of quick steps to get my gmail set up, and its seriously cool feature-wise. Its got labels, gmail style, isntead of the usual folders, and you can also read newsfeeds from the same place.

The usability features are just amazing. The keybindings are extensive, and I’ve already gotten a few favourites (Shift+Arrow keys to traverse links in a page, F8/F9 to switch to URL bar/page). The mouse gestures are pretty neat too, and work pretty fast unlike what I’d expected. There are the usual search engine keywords as well, I always prefer them to the search bar on top.

Extensions: um, there aren’t any. Perhaps its a good thing in a way, its nice to have different browsers with different featuresets I guess. Among the Firefox extensions I use most often, session-saving, undo-closed-tabs, and adblock are all in-built in Opera. I can live without the gmail manager extension as well, since I’m using Opera’s mail client itself. My biggest concern is that I don’t have the Foxmarks bookmarks sync extension with me now. I’ll probably have to look around for a workaround there. As an alternative to extensions, Opera does have widgets. I personally don’t use them (my window manager (Ion3) gives a full screen for each widget), but I had a look at a few and they were pretty nice.

Summary: I’m sticking with Opera at home, I’ve still not decided about the office. Its a really neat competitor to Firefox, and I should’ve probably tried this a long time back. Apart from very minor problems (its closed source, some people might not like that; some keybindings don’t seem to work at times, etc), Opera 9 has enough features to make it one helluva browser.
P.S. Go to this link after installing Opera, and press F11. Those guys sure think up some neat stuff.

Managing my mess of bookmarks (Part I) December 4, 2006

I have a huge mess of bookmarks in Firefox, and faced considerable problems a few months back when I needed to sync them across my work and home PCs. In my quest for a decent bookmarking solution, I experimented with some extensions and online solutions. In this post (Part 1), I’ll cover my experiences with the extensions: Google Browser Sync and Foxmarks.

Google Browser Sync: Well, just don’t use this thing. the only reason I did was because it was the first one I’d heard of. My problems started right with installation, where, for some wierd reason, google had allowed the download only in the US and some other countries. So I asked my brother to download the .xpi and mail it across to me.

Apart from syncing your bookmarks, this extension also syncs your browsing history, cookies and passwords. Somehow I wasn’t that comfortable with my home sessions mixing with my work ones! Nor was the fact that google’d be archiving all this information very comforting either. So I turned off all the options except the bookmarks and got to work.

I found that this extension still had lots of work to do. There were far too many problems when it was trying to update a bookmark that I had later moved to some other folder. There were also unnecessary delays whenever I was closing Firefox, when the synchronisation would take place. From start to finish, this was one extension I wasn’t too comfortable using.

Foxmarks: These guys sure got it right. Ever since this was installed, I never had to worry about what was happening. It works unobtrusively in the background, and handles things perfectly. I got an occasional popup when I’d moved an extension to another folder, asking me which location I wanted to be sync’d with.

You’ll need to register in the Foxmarks website to upload your extensions there (which is what I’ve done). Alternatively, you can mention your own server in the options where it will perform the upload.

Foxmarks has effectively solved all my bookmarking worries. I highly recommend it! (I’ll review the online sites that I’d tried in a later post (del.icio.us and Furl))

Slackware custom search using Google Co op December 1, 2006

I don’t know what rock I’ve been living under, but I just discovered Google’s nice new co-op feature in a Clipmarks page. There’s also a BBC article here.

So… here’s my own attempt: a custom search engine for Slackware specifically, and Linux in general. I’ve also left the ‘contribution’ option open, so if you know of more Slack links that would be useful, you’re welcome to add them.