Archive for July, 2008
Delicious - Finally Tastier
I logged into my this afternoon because I have been trouble crossposting from diigo and I discover that the redesign and new features are finally here!
Zippy
Immediately noticeable is the site is fast! I wouldn’t care if they added a single feature or a new design as long as they kept the new speed. As much as I love delicious for storing, sharing, discovering and accessing bookmarks from anywhere, the speed has always been slooowwww.
Navigation
Navigation has been reorganized into three main sections; Bookmarks, People and Tags. Search has been enhanced and you can now search your bookmarks, a bundle, your networks bookmarks and more.
Tag Bar
The tag bar is a new feature that enables searching bookmarks by tags and tag combinations. And even nicer - it includes autocomplete!
Single Bookmark
It is now super easy to navigate to tags related to the bookmark directly from the bookmark. Each bookmark’s save count is also contained in a blue box. The darker the blue and the bigger the box visually shows how many people have bookmarked that page. Clicking on the blue save count box will give you the complete history of the bookmark and will show you in your network has also saved that page.
Sidebar
The sidebar still lists all of your tags but a feature that I really like is that your top 10 tags are moved to the top. This gives a quick way of telling if another user’s interests are similar to yours.
Finally
Overall, I really like the new design and features but it should have happened sooner. I wish all bookmark pages contained an image of the site like the popular page does and I wish there was more of a social community to the site, similar to diigo. Hopefully, this is only the first wave of improvements.
Why the Command Line is Still Useful
Today, Lifehacker has a post called the Top 10 Command Line Tools. I’m sure most people are thinking, “Command Line? Who uses the Command Line? That’s for old people and went out with DOS.” There are, however, still some really useful reasons for using the command line and it shouldn’t be written off as old and unnecessary.
MAC and Linux users have great command line terminals integrated into the operating system. Windows users can use the Command Prompt or can install Cygwin for Unix emulation. Lifehacker also has information about installing Cygwin.
Twitter Tools - Managing Twitter Via Wordpress
How do you notify Twitter of your new blog posts? Do you add the post manually, use Twitterfeed, use Twitter Tools, or do you use something else? Personally, I use Twitter Tools for Wordpress. Not only can you set it to send your new posts to Twitter, but it also contains a number of other useful features.
Twitter Tools is a Wordpress plugin created by Alex King that assists me in using my Twitter account from within Wordpress. Below is a screenshot of the settings. The settings are accessed in Wordpress via Settings > Twitter Tools.
(Anti) Social-Lists - 7/27/08
Here is the weekly installment of my favorite reads of the week.
- mygazines - read full magazines for free online. found via ghacks
- Life Laundry Day - Zen Habits discusses how taking stock of your financial, career and personal affairs is a great way to stay organized and remove mental clutter.
- Ready to Surrender My Gun - After reviewing E3 coverage, Brainy Gamer discusses why he is getting really tired of the shooter genre. I couldn’t agree more.
- In Defense of Ass Kicking - Chris Guillebeau discusses how we frequently learn more through failure than success. I’m starting to wonder if this list is going to include an article by Chris every week.
- How to Be a Great Mom - a guest post on Zen Habits by Vered of MomGrind that reminds mothers that taking time for themselves will make them better at parenting.
- Coffee Makes You Gullible - Jonathan Fields takes a look at a study that states that coffee drinkers may be more susceptible to persuasion. Hmmm … I’m addicted to coffee and am not very agreeable.
- How to Play Playstation Games on Your PC - makeuseof.com provides detailed step by step instructions on how to play PS1 games on your PC. Make sure you actually own a PS1 before setting this up.
Time Tube by Dipity - A YouTube Timeline
TimeTube by Dipity, which is a personal timeline of historic events manually entered or created with a feed, is a timeline of YouTube videos. Simply type in some keywords and a timeline of videos will be created that can be embedded on your website. The embedded timeline contains four views; timeline, list, flipbook and map. You can search for your favorite musician, your own videos, a political leader, etc. One thing that I noticed, however, is that the timeline is based on the video upload date rather than the date the video was created. So, it is possible that the videos will not be in perfect chronological order. You can also watch the videos from within the timeline or can click through to YouTube.
One of my most anticipated games highlighted at E3 last week was Mirror’s Edge, a first person action adventure that takes place in a dystopian setting where all information is tightly controlled. Below is a timeline of Mirror’s Edge trailers, developer videos, and information from E3.
Fav Thumbs - Visualize Your Delicious Bookmarks
Fav Thumbs, created by one of the developers of Swurl, Ryan Sit, provides a graphical representation of your del.icio.us bookmarks. The idea behind this is that for many of us a picture jogs our memory more than a line of text does. It is also really pretty.
Today, logging in took quite some time. I’m not sure if it’s a the service or if it is because I have so many bookmarks. I don’t remember, however, the login taking so long the first time I looked at this site.
My Timelines - Cut and Paste Timelines for Blog
My Timelines allows you to create an Ajax based interactive timeline, from almost any RSS feed, that can be embedded on your website.
- Input the RSS feed
- Set the display style, font, width and height
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