Jamie Barrows » Me

Bookmarks and tagging

Jamie Barrows — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 16:38:36 +0000

Last month when I heard the news that my favorite bookmarking tool, Google Notebooks, was being discontinued I panicked. I used Google Notebook all the time for everything from notes to bookmarks. And having my notes and bookmarks available to me at all times and on any computer I am using is a must. I looked around at some of the alternatives and did a little research into what I could use to replace it, but in the end I decided I needed to take control of my own bookmarks.

Losing all my bookmarks and notes was not something I wanted to happen to me. And relying on a third party service was just asking for trouble. So I decided to create my own.
Initial Requirements:

Online and accessible from any browser
Private mode so that I can take notes that are only for me
Public mode so that I can publish notes and bookmarks
Tag/label based organization rather than folder based. That way items can be in multiple lists without having to have multiple copies
Easy way to bookmark or clip from any page without having to leave the page

Now anyone who knows me, knows that I am all about adapting existing systems to my needs when I build software. So my initial thought was build my own bookmark service using WordPress as a base. After all, this site and many others I run/administer use WordPress. So I’m pretty familiar with it.

To that end, I started researching what plugins and features were already out there for WordPress that I could use. And the result was the new jamiebarrows.info site. It’s not completely perfect, and I’m still modifying it and tweaking it, but for the moment it does everything I wanted it to do.

Here are a couple of screenshots.

Here are the tools/plugins/themes I am using to accomplish this.

WordPress.Org The underlying engine of the entire site.
PressMark Theme A WordPress theme/conversion that is set up specifically for bookmarking. Has a great little scriptlet that you can add to your toolbar to clip and bookmark while reading or browsing. Also gives you the option of making a bookmark public or private.
Postalicious plugin A WordPress plugin that automatically pulls any Delicious bookmarks along with their tags into WordPress and posts them as a WordPress post. I found that this way I can still use a third party tool to do my bookmarking without surrendering control of those bookmarks.
wp-Spamfree plugin Not strictly a bookmarking plugin, but this does eliminate spam comments almost entirely. Which is important if I want my bookmarks to be open to comments.

And that’s it. The whole thing was a lot easier than I expected it to be. Most of the tools I needed were already written and required little or no modification to get them working the way I wanted them.

All of my bookmarks and notes are now located on a domain and in a database and form that I control. And so far it’s working out pretty well.

LifeStream

Jamie Barrows — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 15:02:59 +0000

Ok, I just added a new plugin to my page called LifeStream.
It’s basically a way to build yourself a kind of current events wall of all your activities on the web. Since most social networking sites these days provide an RSS feed, this plugin compiles all the RSS feeds you give it and provides a chronological timeline of what is happening.
If you use facebook at all, you will probably be right at home with it because its basically a personal updates wall.

So check it out if you get the chance. My LifeStream

New family site

Jamie Barrows — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 00:32:50 +0000

I just set up a new site for my family. I’m using wordpress mu as the back end for it. The cool thing about using wordpress mu, rather than standard wordpress, is that you can set up each user with their own site using subdomains.
So check it out. BarrowsNotes.com

Update

Jamie Barrows — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 07:56:51 +0000

I’ve had pretty limited Internet access recently. So there hasn’t been a lot of activity on this site. But my internet situation should change soon. Meanwhile, my family members have been active in posting to the family website. So feel free to check out the pics there. www.Barrows-Family.com

Playing with twitter

Jamie Barrows — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 20:38:15 +0000

With twitter getting so much attention on the web these days, I thought I should check it out. So I went ahead and created a twitter account.
It’s kind of cool. A lot like the status message on MySpace or Facebook. Not really all that different actually. One cool thing is that you can update it from an IM client or a mobile phone. At this point I’m really wishing there was some way to send a status comment to all the services at once. So that I could send a message to a single location and have it update the status comments on all the services I’m signed up for. But I guess that would be too much to ask. So anyway, here’s a link to my twitter page.