It looks like Furl may be for academic arenas — it allows you to save the actual contents of pages and search through them later. (Delicious only saves the URL’s.) You can also export your links in MLA format for bibliographies. Furl’s UI is full of graphics and color — perhaps the type of website most people are more familiar with.
Delicious may be more for techie arenas — it uses a minimalist interface, has an API for allowing 3rd party software to uses its services, and uses ad-hoc tags instead of predefined categories.
Having said this, when I googled for differences between Furl and Delicious, several people said they use both.
Last week I wrote about bookmarklets, but I didn’t include the bookmarklet that I use the most: my “Delicious” bookmarklet. Del.icio.us, with quite a creative domain name, is a “social bookmarks manager”. Here’s what you do:
After logging in, you will see a link on their About page for a “popup post to del.icio.us”. (It’s a bookmarklet.) Drag it to the bookmarks bar of your browser.
Now, whenever you’re browsing the Web, click on your “Delicious” bookmarklet to bring up the bookmark save window. Enter an extended description or “tags”, if you like, and click Save. Your bookmark is saved.
Unlike your browser’s bookmarks, which only let you save a web site’s name and address, del.icio.us bookmarks will let you save an “extended” description AND “tags”. Tags are where it’s at for del.icio.us. Tags are keywords that YOU choose to identify your favorite web sites. If I find a site about Mac OS X, I save it with the “macosx” tag (it can’t have any spaces) or if I find a site about HTML or security or Brazil, I put those tags on it. I also have a “reading” tag for articles I want to read later. Each page you bookmark can have multiple tags.
Once you have tags on your bookmarks, they have much more meaning. You and everyone can see a list of all your bookmarks at del.icio.us/<your user name>. (Don’t save any bookmarks that would embarrass you, I guess.) My bookmarks are at http://del.icio.us/rkm28. As of right now, I have 408 bookmarks, all of which are tagged, and under each one you’ll see the tags I used to classify them. You will also see, and this is really cool, the number of people who have also saved that page in their bookmarks — a rough indication of the popularity of the page. On the right side of the page you’ll see a list of all the tags I use. You can click any tag to see all the pages with that tag. At the bottom of almost every page is an RSS feed. So if you want to keep track of all bookmarks and be notified when I add one, you can subscribe to http://del.icio.us/rss/rkm28. You can also subscribe to RSS feeds for specific tags. Here are some examples:
Do you see the pattern? And you can make any combination of these you want.
With del.icio.us, your bookmarks are organized, available in any browser, available on any computer, and available for others to look at. (And when I had my hundreds of bookmarks in Safari, it seemed to bog down — Safari was slow — so del.icio.us has solved that problem too.) I absolutely love it.
If any of you sign up for del.icio.us, please let me know — I’ll be interested in subscribing to your RSS feed and seeing what web sites you like.
On an editorial note, some Internet visionaries think this tagging idea is one of the “next big things”. (*I* like it.) A new site called Flickr.com is to photos what del.icio.us is to bookmarks. At Flickr.com you can save photos, tag them, share them with other people, and see other people’s tags. And I’m sure there are other tagging site out there. Let me know if you find any.
My brother Alan just got a new Mac mini last week and he loves it. It has also impressed a few people who’ve come over and seen it.
“Look at Alan’s new computer over there” and I point.
They look around in the direction I pointed — “Where is… Oh, THAT thing?! That’s a computer?”
Alan has been going through the Applications folder, trying all the apps that come with Mac OS X. Today he was playing with the 3D Chess game. While I have seen it before, today was the first time I really looked into it.
One interesting thing about Chess.app is that you can set it to play Computer vs. Computer (besides Computer vs. Person, or Person vs. Person) so it makes for an interesting way of flipping a coin. Alan and I decided to watch a few games of Computer vs. Computer, he rooting for white and I rooting for black. I won once, he won twice, and there were two draws. This is officially going to be our new way of flipping a coin from now on (and making important decisions.) It only takes a few minutes and it’s much more entertaining than a coin because you can root for your team during the game.
It’d be interesting to do this several dozen times and see if the odds turns out to be 50/50.
I visited Las Vegas (home) a couple of weeks ago with my friend Andria, and though we hadn’t planned on it, we ended up going bungy jumping! It was wild!
We went to A.J. Hackett Bungy, which is next to Circus Circus (and often thought to belong to them.) It cost $59 to bungy jump the first time, but they gave us what I’ll call a frequent faller card so your 2nd and 3rd jumps are $25 each and the 4th jump is free. There were 4 or 5 workers there, and though we were the only ones there, they were definitely equipped to handle large groups. Everyone at A.J. Hackett was extremely professional — even calm — so I didn’t have any (additional) concerns about my safety on their part.
First we had to initial and sign two pages of waivers and disclaimers, including that we wouldn’t be upset if we were to accidentally dip into the pool below and get wet. Then, after weighing in and getting the appropriate bungy cord and harness, we took the elevator up to the jump platform. As the elevator rose, we could see the swimming pool above which we would jump shrink below us and disappear. I sat down on a padded platform where they tied my feet together and tugged and tugged at it. They asked me to give a tug too. They then hooked my waist harness (for backup) and my feet to the bungy cord. Then I bunny hopped to the edge, stretched out my arms at their request, and jumped.
What a crazy feeling to be free falling for a long time (1 second?) before the cord catches you. It’s a wild, wild feeling.
The jump was 171 feet, the highest permanent bungy jump in the U.S. After falling the first time, the elasticity of the bungy cord pulls you back up 80% of the distance. Then you of course bounce up and down a few more times, blood rushing to your head, and then they pull you in to the side and release you from the cord.
As you leave the “landing” area, you have to walk under a low hanging bar which has a “watch your head” sign. I remember thinking to myself, “why don’t they get rid of this bar so they don’t get sued?” And I immediately knew the answer, “Oh yeah, I already signed away all my expectations for safety while I’m here.”
OK, enough talk — if a picture is worth a thousand words, then this video clip will be worth more than a million. (12 frames per second x 87 seconds x 1000 words/picture — you do the math.)
P.S. If the Red-Bull-influenced narration on this video bothers you, turn down your speakers.
Hi folks, I’m back, and today’s topic is “bookmarklets”.
That’s “bookmarklets” as in the diminuitive form of “bookmarks,” the web sites you save in your Internet browser. (They’re called bookmarks in Safari/Firefox/Mozilla/Netscape or “Favorites” in Internet Explorer.)
Bookmarklets require Javascript to be on (it probably already is) and they give special functionality to your browser. In Safari or Firefox, you can drag the links below right onto your Bookmarks bar. Then just click! Here are some examples:
Resize your browser window to 1024×768 and move it to the upper-left corner of the screen (0,0). You can replace those numbers with anything you want, to automatically make the browser window as small or large as you want: javascript:self.resizeTo(1024,768);self.moveTo(0,0)
And my favorite bookmarklet and reason for blogging about them today: “Bugmenot”. This bookmarklet opens a window to “www.bugmenot.com” that shows a working name and password for whatever site you’re currently on. Today I opened a news article from some newspaper in the Midwest that was asking me to register before I could read the article. Instead of going through the hassle of registering and giving away my personal information, I simply clicked the “Bugmenot” bookmarklet on my Bookmarks bar and it opened up a window with a name and password I could use for the newspaper. I typed them in and got to my article right away. (By the way, if you click the Bugmenot button and no name/password is available for that site, it will ask you to enter *your* name and password so it can be shared with other bugmenot users. Of course, you would only want to do that for generic registrations that don’t have any of your personal information.) javascript:void(window.open('http://bugmenot.com/view.php?mode=bookmarklet&url='+escape(location), 'BugMeNot', 'location=no,status=yes,menubar=no,scrollbars=yes,resizable=yes,width=385,height=450'))
Let me know if you need help getting bookmarklets to work. I think once you use them you’ll really like them.
