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Request for suggestions: Group Bookmarking Tool
Paul Keith:
Hmm...that's a good point. Maybe mouser should switch to Simpy for the slow network users?
mwang:
-The cliff's notes view that Diigo has which saves time going to a site because you can have several sites and click expand on them.-Paul Keith (September 05, 2008, 05:22 PM)
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Yes, that's about the only thing I can't duplicate in Firefox right now, and that's why I said I hope it could be integrated with Firefox's bookmark system, in a way that I can look up a bookmark and see the highlighted parts in a submenu.
What I currently do is when I highlight something with Wired-Marker, I also bookmark the page and tag it with "wmark" (along with other tags). So at least now I could easily locate bookmarked pages with highlights, which is more than what diigo gave me (the "Annotated" tab often gave me nothing or no more than 3 bookmarks, while in fact I had a few dozen).
-The problem with having to deal with two different exports on two different locations.-Paul Keith (September 05, 2008, 05:22 PM)
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This is easier to deal with. I've separate system and data partitions, and Firefox profile is on the data partition, which is backed up regularly. I also set Scrapbook, Zotero and Wired-Marker data folders away from the Firefox profile folder, into places where they're backed up more often than the FF profile folder tree, and made available for my search tool (Archivarius). (Though Archivarius doesn't search Wired-Marker or other sqlite db yet.)
Also since Wired Marker is Firefox only, it really leaves me chained to that browser and sometimes when Firefox is slow for me I switch to another browser and just use the Diigolet. I wonder if the Foxmarks people would be willing to add Scrapbook and Wired Marker syncing to their features if someone suggested it... a black hole is still better than no hole.-Paul Keith (September 05, 2008, 05:22 PM)
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That's a good point. Though Firefox 3 is really fast on my desktop and I use it almost exclusively now, I really don't want to be tied to a particular product, either. For material related to my research, I always try to save the page locally first. (I set up proxomitron filters to help me get material on my favorite sources into shape.) But Firefox bookmarks, Scrapbook and Zotero all can export their databases, and Wired-Marker uses sqlite, a standard format. So I'm not too worried.
Still, I'm on the hunt for a better solution, as you do. If you stick to diigo, please let me know if they get improvements.
BTW, what good does it do if Foxmarks can sync Scrapbook and Wired-Marker databases? Can you use Foxmarks in browsers other than Firefox? If it's not cross-browser support but cross-computer support you're after, than there're other tools that let you sync the entire Firefox profile, I believe.
... a black hole is basically an account with bookmarks with so many different tags and so many bookmarks that you end up not being able to check back on any of them unless you want a specific one ...-Paul Keith (September 05, 2008, 05:22 PM)
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Another good point, that's why I started moving my bookmarks to diigo in the first place; my firefox bookmarks were getting out of hand, and there were no tools to mass-tag them according to the folder structured then (there are now). Too bad that didn't work out for me.
Now with some good extensions, my black hole is getting in order. Tagsifter is my favorite; it allows me to filter bookmarks with something like
"tag1 - (tag2 + !tag3)"
Not possible with diigo or any other social bookmarking sites.
I also like FF3's smart bookmarks system. Though it's not very user friendly yet (some geeky tuning involved), it allows me to add dynamic folders to my bookmark toolbar. Diigo has lists, but lists are static, and it doesn't have tag bundles like delicious.
It's also easy to delete a tag from multiple bookmarks at once in Firefox -- another thing not possible with diigo.
So, on balance I like Firefox's bookmarking system (with extensions) better, and judging from what happened this summer, the speed of improvement clearly favors Firefox community as well. Diigo does keep moving, but the pace is slow.
Paul Keith:
What I currently do is when I highlight something with Wired-Marker, I also bookmark the page and tag it with "wmark" (along with other tags). So at least now I could easily locate bookmarked pages with highlights, which is more than what diigo gave me (the "Annotated" tab often gave me nothing or no more than 3 bookmarks, while in fact I had a few dozen).
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Yeah, I use a variation of this by only submitting bookmarks with highlighted pages to Diigo and then transferring my non-highlighted bookmarks to incollector. I find having a bookmark manager in my systray helps me access them better than the pressure of having to open a browser especially if it's not the one I currently plan to use at the time and yes, I think the annotated tab is buggy but I wasn't sure since I didn't really understand what it was there for but when I tried it all I got was many bookmarks with 0 annotations.If you still have your account, maybe we can clarify this issue up by posting to the groups. I really hate it when I make a topic there now and no one replies at all.
This is easier to deal with. I've separate system and data partitions, and Firefox profile is on the data partition, which is backed up regularly. I also set Scrapbook, Zotero and Wired-Marker data folders away from the Firefox profile folder, into places where they're backed up more often than the FF profile folder tree, and made available for my search tool (Archivarius). (Though Archivarius doesn't search Wired-Marker or other sqlite db yet.)
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This is interesting. Can you give more info on how you do this? Partitioning is something that I'm unfamiliar of or at least I never tried it because I fear I might break something and do you just backup the entire profile page? I find it much harder to figure out how to backup Firefox because on Opera I just copy the individual notes/sessions/etc. and re-paste them back to my browser when I switch and I feel more comfortable with that because it gives me a sense of knowing what it is I'm importing back.
As for the Zotero, Scrapbook, Wired-Marker data folders, what do you name them? I find I still forget this often because I haven't developed a good backup habit. At best I backup my notetakers but when it comes to contents that has more than 1 file, I'm at a lost. I'm almost tempted to use portable browsers but again there's the fear that I might run dry of memory or I might forget to backup my data from the usb stick to another place and lose everything when it breaks.
Still, I'm on the hunt for a better solution, as you do. If you stick to diigo, please let me know if they get improvements.
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Will do. I'm hoping they get to v4 soon. I still see my extension regularly getting updates but it seems they're focusing on something different (maybe stability since they got chewed on that bad when they released v3) and rarely release new features anymore but it's also worrying that they are losing their improvements too so yeah, I'll keep you updated. I'm actually thinking of going down the road of web capturing tools like EverNote and Surfulator but many of them are web clippers without the ease of highlighting so I'm really back to square one.
BTW, what good does it do if Foxmarks can sync Scrapbook and Wired-Marker databases? Can you use Foxmarks in browsers other than Firefox? If it's not cross-browser support but cross-computer support you're after, than there're other tools that let you sync the entire Firefox profile, I believe.
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Yeah, I think I've heard of those, Weave is one of them I think. For me, it's both just a safety net and a habit checker. I really want to avoid getting to a point where I rely on something to a point where I put all my eggs in one basket without knowing what eggs I'm putting in. It's part of why I never quite got used to syncing programs and mass copy and pasting of non-relevant things together with similar genres, tags or something else. It just messes with my head. I'm not sure if it's because I'm a control freak, paranoid or just because I really don't want to put so much effort in something I don't have a framework on only to find it's not for me later on and have to mass migrate to another place and constantly juggling what should be just snippets of data that help me become much more informed. You see, I have to deal with this problem when I first got introduced to RSS. At first it was finally a massive body of data like the Great Library but then I now have to look for different RSS Readers, got to understand what starring an article means, having to deal with many comments going to social media site, needing to wonder how I can sync twitter comments with the actual article, needing to deal with how to read all the trackbacks when many of them repeat the same thing and nowadays I end up being busy organizing and re-organizing what folders my feeds should be that I don't even get to ever narrow my unread count to single digits because I also have to deal with all the other unread tab sessions I have and it's all so additionally inconvenient because then I'm screwed with medium projects like having to learn Linux and focusing on it only or learn backup habits and testing out TrueCrypt or writing a story because none of these data become unretrieval. Worse, if I don't have a black hole, I can be so occupied organizing them that I miss out on features like delicious because I thought my offline bookmarks where ok for me only to lose them all when something goes wrong with my operating system because I thought I was so close to finding the optimum organization for me that I thought I'd skip the back up phase until the end.
Now with some good extensions, my black hole is getting in order. Tagsifter is my favorite; it allows me to filter bookmarks with something like
"tag1 - (tag2 + !tag3)"
Not possible with diigo or any other social bookmarking sites.
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Yeah I have heard of Tagsifter before but I didn't try it because of my lack of need for Firefox bookmarks at the time I found it. You made me curious though. Could you explain what that formula means further? I rarely had to go 3 layers down a tag when searching so I really don't understand how the formula is supposed to work but it really got me interested since it sounds very much like dynamic folders to me.
It's also easy to delete a tag from multiple bookmarks at once in Firefox -- another thing not possible with diigo.
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Yeah, tell me about it. This was one of the main complaints about Diigo.
So, on balance I like Firefox's bookmarking system (with extensions) better, and judging from what happened this summer, the speed of improvement clearly favors Firefox community as well. Diigo does keep moving, but the pace is slow.
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Thanks, please message me when there's new improvements coming along in the Firefox community. You'd probably have more information to share than I do with Diigo because yes, the pace is slow but to be honest, the competition hasn't caught up with them much either so we'll have to see where this is all headed.
Firefox community is something that I never really was able to penetrate to but I've primarily only attempted to connect to this unofficial forum (I think it was Mozillazine) when I encountered a problem with my FF3 and got my topic locked on the spot because I was using an Opera account e-mail and so I tried again, this time with more details including explaining how stupid it is for an Opera troll to use an Opera account if he wanted to cause trouble but I only got a different mod lock my topic while saying I was being vague but of course I couldn't clarify my problem anymore since the topic was locked so yeah that's one of the other reasons why I try to have at least black hole accounts and whole profile syncing because it really hurts when you're left to dry by the main service you're using.
mwang:
Yeah, I use a variation of this by only submitting bookmarks with highlighted pages to Diigo and then transferring my non-highlighted bookmarks to incollector.-Paul Keith (September 06, 2008, 08:42 PM)
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Incollector does look interesting, and it works on both Windows and Linux, just what I'm looking for. Will give a shot when I'm done with the papers.
If you still have your account, maybe we can clarify this issue up by posting to the groups. I really hate it when I make a topic there now and no one replies at all.-Paul Keith (September 06, 2008, 08:42 PM)
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Sorry, no, my accounts are all closed. I also asked several questions on the forum before giving up, and got no replies. Furthermore, I did a few searches on the forum just now, and couldn't find my questions anymore. I can only infer that they kill poeple's posts after their accounts are closed. Nice way to reduce the number of negative stuff on the board.
Partitioning is something that I'm unfamiliar of or at least I never tried it because I fear I might break something and do you just backup the entire profile page?-Paul Keith (September 06, 2008, 08:42 PM)
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It's easy enough with the "Computer Management" tool -- one of the Administrative Tools that comes with Windows (2000 and up). Just shrink the current volume and create a new one. While the process is non-destructive, I still back up my data each time I do this. Would be even easier (and safer) if you could get yourself another hard drive.
And I don't know what's a "profile page"? I back up the system and the various data partitions differently. Many applications (including Firefox) store their settings and data under the "Users" folder tree ("Documents and Settings" for older Windows) on C. I move them to drive D (my data partition) if I want them backed up.
I find it much harder to figure out how to backup Firefox because on Opera I just copy the individual notes/sessions/etc.-Paul Keith (September 06, 2008, 08:42 PM)
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Can't compare with Opera since I don't use it anymore, but I wonder how it can be any harder. All user-specific stuff is in the profile folder. Just ignore the "cache" and copy everything else. (I put the cache on a RAMDrive, since I've more RAM than a Win32 system can use. This way the cache is wiped automatically every time I reboot the system.)
It gets more complicated if you want to pick and choose what to back up (I do), but I guess it's the same with other applications.
As for the Zotero, Scrapbook, Wired-Marker data folders, what do you name them?-Paul Keith (September 06, 2008, 08:42 PM)
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Name them? Zotero & Scrapbook allow you to designate where they store the data (check the options) so that's easy. Wired-Marker doesn't provide that, so I use symlink (similar to folder junction in XP) to move the data folder.
I find I still forget this often because I haven't developed a good backup habit.
-Paul Keith (September 06, 2008, 08:42 PM)
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This is the real problem then. I back up my data more often and keep more copies than my system. You can always reinstall the system (time-consuming aside), but can't reinstall the data. There's no single best solution that works for everyone, for it all depends on your needs and the resources you have, but you should have a backup solution if you value your data.
Need to get back to work now. Will continue later.
mwang:
Yeah I have heard of Tagsifter before but I didn't try it because of my lack of need for Firefox bookmarks at the time I found it. You made me curious though. Could you explain what that formula means further? I rarely had to go 3 layers down a tag when searching so I really don't understand how the formula is supposed to work but it really got me interested since it sounds very much like dynamic folders to me.-Paul Keith (September 06, 2008, 08:42 PM)
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Its website explains the syntax well. Usually it's enough to just type a couple of tags in the Awesomebar to get what I want, and for the most often used combinations I set them up on the bookmark toolbar with smart bookmarks (dynamic folders) I mentioned earlier.
Tagsifter is for more complicated searches. I use the "not" operator (the minus sign in the example) the most. E.g., it's easy enough with diigo (and FF) to find something tagged with "news" and "2008", but it's hard to find news "before 2008". With Tagsifter, "news - 2008" does it.
The "or" operation is also useful, like "news, (2007 + 2006)" will get me news clips from the two years.
You can't save Tagsifter searches as dynamic folders yet, though it's on the wishlist. As mentioned previously, I use FF's Smart Bookmark for dynamic folders, but it's not as flexible as Tagsifter.
Firefox community is something that I never really was able to penetrate ... -Paul Keith (September 06, 2008, 08:42 PM)
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Sorry to hear that, but I wasn't really talking about the forums. I mean the Firefox extension architecture is really reaping the rewards now with all these extensions filling the holes of the main product. "Tagging" was introduced with FF3, just released in June, and in the two plus months since we've got all these nice extensions to make up for its deficiencies and more, and they're still improving. (FF3 of course started beta much earlier, but the bookmark system wasn't finalized -- with several functions scrapped -- until late, and most of the tagging-related extensions didn't -- and probably couldn't -- start showing up on AMO earlier than that.)
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