Stray Dog Strut

Just a quick one today. How do y’all manage your bookmarks?

I’m slowly suffocating under the weight of all the bookmarks I have in Safari – I actually have no idea how many there are – and then there’s all the ones from Firefox too *shudders* I’ve spent most of the morning trying to clear them all out and better organise my hierarchy, but since I like to categorise stuff I have folder within folder within folder…you get the picture.

Oh I went all modern and signed up to Delicious awhile ago now of course, but it’s not yet part of my bookmarking strategy. In fact, it’s filling up with bookmarks too so I desperately need to sync it with my desktop browsers. I’ve been taking Cocoalicious for a spin (a desktop client that lets you manage your Delicious bookmarks). It’s all right but the lack of any help had me scratching my head as to how you delete bookmarks – until I discovered you press backspace instead of delete, geez! It’s a bit simple though and doesn’t seem to do much else but hey it’s free. I know there’s other apps/plugins out there (Safarilicious etc) but until I get my bookmarks organised, there’s no point sticking them on Delicious.

I’m not all together convinced Delicious is for me anyway, I can’t really seem to get away from folders in favour of tags (it’s weird seeing stuff coming up under multiple tags in Cocoalicious). Still, maybe when I finally get through this lot i’ll give it a shot. A nice little tut I found just now suggests using symbols in the bookmarks bar. I’ve already replaced “Apple” with the Apple symbol as seen below, now I just need to get a bit more creative with the rest to squeeze more in..

Since my last post grumbling about Twine, i’ve been trying out some other social bookmarking/social interests tools. More on that later, but it got me to thinking about opening a few different tabs when Safari starts up.

At the moment my homepage is faithful old Google, and I have a suite of regular links in the Bookmarks Bar above. Still, I thought it might be nice if I had other tabs open with some of the sites I want to quickly glance at. Strangely, I discovered Safari (3.2) doesn’t do this out of the box (other browsers let you just type more web addresses separated by semi-colons), so I started reading around for some fix.

Macosxhints has a post on using Applescript to open multiple pages as the homepage but I didn’t really want to go down that route (and in any case, i’m not sure where you put the Applescript?).

The first thing that came to my mind was using Automator. For those not in the know, Automator is an app preinstalled with Mac OS X that let’s you script little actions in a really nice drag and drop way. Basically scripting for the masses=) I currently have a couple of workflows to back up my local emails and run an iTunes alarm clock.

Well the existing Safari action Display Webpages only opens webpages in seperate browser windows, so that was less than ideal. However, by installing the Display Webpages as Tabs action for Automator by Eric Blair, and using it in place of Display Webpages, you can create a workflow that opens multiple pages in tabs. For it to work, you have to enable Tabbed browsing in Safari, and set links from applications to “open in a new tab in the current window.”

All well and good, and to be honest that might be a workable solution for you if you drag the app into your Finder startup items so that it runs when you turn on your Mac, or if you manually start the app yourself. However, I went a little further.

Since I saved the Automator action as an app, I simply dragged it to my Applications folder (You don’t have to, but it makes sense) and using the simple method of changing icons in Mac OS X, I copied the Safari one and pasted it over my new app (which I called “safariload” to remind me). I then dragged the app to the Dock to create a shortcut to it, and removed the original Safari link from the Dock (It’s still in your Applications folder, don’t worry!).

Simply clicking on the new app icon in the Dock – which looks just like the old Safari icon – causes the Automator functions to be executed, opening a safari window with multiple tabs. It works but with two minor issues: The the new Safari window isn’t in focus when it loads and, since the app launches Safari and you have a shortcut pinned to your Dock, you have two Safari icons while Safari is open.

Still, it’s another method I thought i’d throw out there. Don’t know if it’s original.

“Semantic”

- Relating to meaning in language or logic

One of the new(ish) buzzwords around town seems to be the ‘semantic web’ or web 3.0 as some are calling it. I’ll be honest and say I’m only ankle deep in the whole thing, but as far as I’m aware, the idea is for a web with meaning attached to the data. So, rather than search engines simply returning the results of keywords, those words will have meaning and relationships. Using metadata, sites and software will know the relationships between names and words, and manipulate the content in a useful way.

That’s the theory anyway. One of the services aiming to deliver a semantic web is Twine by Radar Networks. I read an article about Twine on Think Artificial a few weeks ago and tonight I thought I’d take it for a spin. Twine describes itself as a “social interests tool” rather than a social networking tool. It’s a way to keep up to date with your interests, rather than your friends (although it has some social networking capabilities too apparently). Twine allows you to gather all the data from your travels around the web (bookmarks, images, videos etc) in one place and filter them semantically. It’s early days so some teething issues are to be expected, but overall I have to say my initial impression of Twine is less than favourable.

I’ve never really gone in for bookmarking services like Deli.cio.us or social networking services like Facebook, so I don’t really know what I was expecting. But since my bookmarks are in need of a good spring clean, the allure of a system that learns your tastes and allows meaningful searching of data was too much to resist.

In practice I found the interface and it’s manipulation very basic and clunky. You create twines on topics that interest you and Twine constantly returns the latest submissions to that area of interest. Twine seemed to do that okay, but I was disappointed to find I couldn’t customise the twines homepage much (I was looking for an iGoogle like drag and drop functionality) so having multiple twines seems like it would be a bit cumbersome. Also, adding items to Twine could have been more intuitive. Sure, if you find a website you like you can just click the Add to Twine bookmark that they give you and a dialog pops up, allowing you to name the bookmark etc. The problem was, I accidentally added the item to My Items and an existing twine on a completely unrelated subject (some sharing option that it wouldn’t let me deselect). Since it seems you can’t remove items from twines you don’t manage, I couldn’t see a way to correct my mistake.

Another source of confusion was the functionality for importing your bookmarks. While I knew that sorting out my bookmarks in Twine would still mean going back to my old bookmarks folder and manually having a clear out, I thought that Twine would be a good way of filtering them easily to begin with. In practice though the tagging filters were next to useless: simply filtering my bookmarks into two categories – “bookmarks” and “videos” – and coming up with nonsensical related tags. I suspect this is because, as some reviewers have said, Twine relies on properly structured webpages to allow it to extract the metadata, and unfortunately the web is a scrap heap of poorly made webpages, so I can’t blame Twine completely there. However, even with my bookmarks in Twine, I didn’t seem to have basic options like batch commands (multiple item delete etc) or alphabetical sorting, and the lack of effective filters made clicking through individual bookmarks a chore. In the end I gave up.

That said, partly because I can’t figure out a way to quit Twine, but also because I should give it the benefit of the doubt, I’m going to persevere a little longer. I still like the idea of semantic tagging of items and a more intelligent web, I just haven’t found it so helpful in practice. I have a suspicion that Twine may not be for me after all, but I’d be interested to hear other people’s thoughts on Twine or similar services. In my case, I’m basically looking for a way to keep up with my interests with an rss-like delivery. Other features like recommendations and social networking would be a bonus. Twine promises to deliver much of this but so far, it seems, not very intuitively.