Impressions Scholarcast

In a previous post I mentioned me need to have a home page of important links to the cloud apps I use heavily on a regular basis. Managing this home page of bookmarks needs to be as efficient and convenient as possible. I decided to use the simple but effective techniques of Delicious bookmark caches for my main home page.

My bookmark collection on Delicious is public in order to leverage the full social sharing capabilities. For my home page I mark my bookmarks as private so as not to pollute my other bookmarks and because some personal cache bookmarks need authentication. This choice is entirely optional. I then chose to structure my bookmarks at two levels, the main list linking to a series of secondary lists. I use the tag mjr (my initials) for the top level list of bookmarks and I set my browser home page to delicious.com/mrees/mjr which currently looks like:

I chose a unique tag to act as as the key for bookmarks at the secondary level. For historical reasons I use mjrkeya but any meaningful tag will do. Each secondary bookmark uses this tag plus one other tag to signify the category such as cloudtool for my Cloud Tool List category. Thus delicious.com/mrees/mjrkeya+cloudtool is the URL for my list of cloud tools. I can use the Delicious browser tool to add a new bookmark into my caches very easily:

1. Acquire the link by positioning the browser at the page or using the right-click context menu item Bookmark this link in Delicious
2. In the Edit Bookmark dialog mark the link as Private
3. Enter the tags mjrkeya and the secondary category

Once the secondary level bookmarks are entered then the top level list can be created. For example the Cloud Tools List bookmark is:

An example of the Cloud Tool List at the secondary level is:

After some experimentation to keep the vertical spacing of these bookmarks to a minimum I add several formatting options for my Delicious Home Page in my browser. My current URL reduces each bookmark to 1 line, paginates 25 bookmarks at a time, and sorts them in alpha order:

    http://delicious.com/mrees/mjr?sort=alpha&order=asc&detail=1&setcount=25

This is difficult to remember when setting up a new browser so it is stored in a private bookmark delicious.com/mrees/mjrstart.

Only one problem remains. When viewing a second level list how do you quickly return to the top level? Answer, create a tag bundle and add the necessary bookmark for the top level delicious.com/mrees/mjr. One click on the mjr tag takes me back home. Tag bundles appear on the right of Delicious pages:

Note that every Delicious bookmark in the various lists has an Edit and Delete button which allows very quick, in-context editing to change title, URL and tags. Managing these two levels of caching is very, very easy.

I have been using these techniques for about a year and am extremely happy. Very minor gripes include the somewhat slow response for Delicious pages in Australia and the need to re-login to my account every 10 days or so. I recommend this approach to everyone.

As as strong adherent of working in the cloud (10 cloud apps and list of cloud apps) I need my browser home page to give me instant access to my preferred cloud apps. Over the last year or two I have experimented with some of my own web apps. I started with my own DotWikIEWeb tool which is an ultra lightweight wiki allowing quick in-place editing of parts of a page called i-grains. The screen fragment to the left shows the links in part of the my home page. Hovering over an i-grain such as WebTwoOServices reveals an edit menu to allow the i-grain contents including the links to be switched to editing mode as seen on the right. The Close menu saves the changes in memory and the Save All menu on the left saves the wiki page.

This worked well but could only be used with IE since DotWikIEWeb uses the built-in IE HTML editing component not available in other browsers. As I became a Firefox user another solution was needed.

Teaching an ASP.NET class at the time I then knocked up a DotLinx site to hold a simple list of key links in alpha order. ASP.NET is browser neutral so works automatically with Firefox and IE. Each link is preceded by an ‘@’ link which when clicked allows editing of the link, deletion and insertion of new links. Again it is normal use on the left and editing on the right. DotLinx uses an XML file as a simple database.

For a dead set simple layout (not my best UI design ever) and trivial implementation this worked well for a while until I started using Delicious social bookmarking heavily. In a previous post I extolled the virtues of bookmark caches as just one of the many useful features of the Delicious social bookmark service. Ease of use was well in advance of my own DotLinx web app so it seemed sensible to put Delicious to work as my home page of links. This is described in another post.

I was alerted by Jane Hart to word mosaics from Imagechef which take Wordle at step further for simple words and phrases.

With a rotating attendance of 40-50 at any one time I spent the day at Barcamp Brisbane IV at the East Brisbane Bowls Club yesterday. It was a leisurely start of 10 am to allow extra time for people to arrive. The organisers and early attendees soon had the open space of the club partitioned into 4 meeting spaces, 2 with projectors. The Twitter hashtag was #barcampbne but the tweeting activity was down on last time.

See the CoverItLive Replay for the full tweet capture and the mesmerising VisibleTweets for the animated version.

The main organisers Paul O’Keeffe and Steve Dalton did a great job as usual, and timekeeper/wrangler did excellent duty with his cowbell. The event attracted an impressive list of sponsors, all of which gave talks during the day. It was good to see a wide variety of sponsor products and services. Like many others I took advantage of the free portraits being shot by DJ Paine of Studio Promise and look forward to seeing the outcome. Had I known this was to be available I would have dressed more formally than in my Twitter t-shirt!

There were varied talks on SEO, Google Wave in which I was a live participant, legal structures for companies, startup incubation and advice, developments in image panoramas, driving CMS with XSLT (innovative but hard), real-world agile development, Linux install from USB drive, and a run through Amazon Web Services.

A big problem was what I dubbed the hacker’s corner where a group sat at their laptops all day. They rarely mixed with others, and chatted and guffawed non-stop during the event often drowning out the speaker giving the main talk, despite suggestions they desist. This stereotypical, antisocial nerd behaviour was sad to see even though it was a tiny minority.

I enjoyed the barcamp and made some useful contacts. Thanks again to Paul and Steve for their major efforts in staging another successful event. However significant changes at the bowls club or a different venue will be needed to entice me back.

Several weeks ago I noticed a link containing xeesm.com in my Twitter stream and discovered this was a pre-beta version of a ‘Social Site & Relationship Manager’. Sign-up was available and I became the 175th user of this potentially useful service claiming my full name. Very quickly I was able enter a selection of my social media sites which are accessed at http://xeesm.com/MichaelRees:

The Xeesm was and still is somewhat embryonic with a big frustration being once a link is added or edited it is difficult to check the end result easily. Nevertheless I was happy to use this URL as a single point of contact and even changed my Twitter badge to use the link.

Such a simple and useful idea was bound to have competition and I soon came across a competitor in card.ly and quickly snagged http://card.ly/MichaelRees:

I like the choice of themes and the feature to download a vCard by clicking the icon at the top left. Also I find the link somewhat easier to remember. So my Twitter badge currently uses my card.ly link.

A couple of days ago listening to the second episode of the new This Week in Google podcast from the Leo Laporte stable reminded me of Google Profiles which now has similar aggregation features for your social media sites. I hurriedly dusted up my old Google profile at http://google.com/profiles/mjrees which is not very compact but offers similar features including a vCard download:

I recently blogged about using only my Twitter handle on my business card. Subsequently I followed Des Walsh’s advice and ordered my cards from Click Business Cards. At the same time I had to think of a new activity description and decided on social media architect – one who designs and integrates collections of social media tools into a cohesive toolset for a business or individual.

No doubt we have several more competitors to come.

I spent a hyperactive day at the East Brisbane Bowls Club with about 60 others at Barcamp Brisbane III, a joint Barcamp Brisbane/Gold Coast meeting. Because I spent the last couple of nights at an apartment in Dockside just down river I had the honour of being first to arrive. It was good to see a strong signal for my 3 wireless broadband and was able to keep the CoverItLive live blog running through the day on the trusty Eee PC 1000 (photo courtesy of Steve Dalton).

I gave a talk about some of my favourite cloud applications to an audience of 30 or so just after the opening speed networking session where we spoke to about 6 people previously unknown to us switching every minute.

Past and present Bond students were there in Michael Battle, Ben Novakovic and Matt Carter. There were also some fellow past DSTC colleagues in Paul King and Bob Brown. I was kept extremely busy through the day reminiscing as well as discovering a considerable amount of new stuff.

It was good to see social media coming through strongly with talks from Des Walsh, Anthony Dever and Ben Grubb with detailed reporting by Hannah Suarez.

The day was most fascinating and extremely tiring. I can’t wait for the next one later in the year.