Things I need but don’t know if they exist

May 17th, 2007 • Related • Filed Under

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I have recently noticed that my online existence could be greatly improved with a few simple tools (well I think they are simple.) Here is a list of things that would make my life easier.

Bookmark Search Plug-in (Firefox) That gives you the Ability to quickly search within my bookmarks. It would Firstly search within the titles, then use a search engine ‘Google’ to search only the sites I have bookmarked (am sure this must have already been done!)

Custom Feed Generator - One that I can supply it with (n) feeds and create my own new personal feed out of. The reason I want this is that I use 4-5 different services where I ’share’ links which then creates a RSS feed, but to make it useful I need to amalgamate that into one Feed which I could offer to my readers.

UPDATE: Thanks to a few of my readers I found feedblendr that does exactly as I wanted. I have now created a feed that is sourced from several sites where I ’share’ interesting articles. Right now it’s not got enough in it but once I am happy it is useful to my readers I will publish the feedburner address.

Firefox plug-in - that keeps track of how often I use certain bookmarks and gives suggestions on which ones to start archiving. Plus it uses the ‘how often’ to re-order the lists so the popular ones go to the top.

Another Firefox plug-in (or a web site like del.icio.us) - That takes all your current bookmarks and automatically re-structures the folders. How would it do this? Well
it would require a database of all popular websites (lots) and the categories that they sit under (lots of places you can use online to find this out). It would then depending on how many links you have under certain categories split them up into further categories.

So for example if you have 50 programming related bookmarks (I wish I had that few!) then it would automatically create your folders to further split it up, it would keep doing this until there were only 10 links within each folder. You could even have different templates of how your folders got setup, e.g. ‘programming/php/ajax’ or ‘ajax/programming/php’

If these things have already been done please let me know so I can sign up! and if they haven’t feel free to write them.

There Are 5 Responses So Far. »

  1. Comment by Douglas Karr on 17 May 2007:

    For bookmarks, I love the Del.icio.us plugin.

  2. Comment by admin on 17 May 2007:

    I havent had it installed lately, as it never quite integrated tightly enough for my liking, and did not make the bookmark experience any simpler, in fact it makes it more complicated.

    Having to do the tagging myself is just too much hassle, there should be a way for it to look at the tags others have given a particular site, and let you just auto-use them.

    I think it was a Joel on Software article I was reading recently (or one of his books) that stated that a lot of the most successful software stories can be seen in products that have actually removed features, adding simplicity is one of the hardest things you can do.

    My request for auto-organising, is something along these lines, it would stop me needing to spend 5-10 minutes re-organising everytime I add too many new bookmarks.

  3. Comment by Jonathon on 18 May 2007:

    Comments RSS feed is broken (I wanted to see if anyone has any solutions to your Firefox addins as I am looking for some too).

  4. Comment by jazzle on 24 May 2007:

    I use the NON-official del.icio.us plugin.
    It’s much better - shows you tags other people have used - just click to use them.

  5. Comment by Steve Clay on 25 May 2007:

    For “Custom Feed Generator”, make a Yahoo! Pipe. This service is brilliant.

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