So here’s a little experiment. I’ve subscribed to a del.icio.us tag called for:bschoate. If you want to share a link with me, just tag it on del.icio.us using that tag. And sure, why not— Flickr too.
Update: Switching to “for” instead — easier to remember and is in use by others too. Yeah, this breaks the permalink for this entry. Deal.
In keeping with my apparent schedule of one post per month, here’s one for this month.
There’s not a whole lot of documentation on del.iciou.us about how to use the site or what all you can do with it (not that it needs much… the interface is simple enough to use). Yes, there is some API documentation, but I can’t find any user documentation anywhere. This may or may not be covered in the mailing list archives, I don’t know. I just stumbled upon it myself.
del.iciou.us is a great service if you haven’t discovered it already. For those that haven’t, you might think it’s some sort of free-form Metafilter. But it’s not. It’s a permalink warehouse basically. And it’s totally open. Create an account, post links. You can optionally associate your links with a set of tags. And the tags are what make del.iciou.us so incredibly useful.
A tag is simply a way to associate the link with a name. That name can be anything. On del.icio.us, they are typically short, lowercase words. It might be a category that means something to you. It might be the name of a person (although tag names cannot have a space in them, so you’ll have to ProperCase that or something).
del.icio.us lets you see all the links posted by everyone. In fact, there is no way to post private links right now. Those links pile up pretty quick and they cover all kinds of subjects. If you want to view the links associated with a particular tag, like “design”, you can use a address like this:
Listing the links that I (or you, if you substitute your username for mine) have posted to the “design” tag is easy too:
http://del.icio.us/bschoate/design
That’s pretty powerful by itself. But what if you are just interested in the links that cover CSS design. You could look for the “css” tag:
Okay… still a lot of links. What about the ones that list both “css” and “design”? Well, you can do that too!
http://del.icio.us/tag/css+design
The “+” symbol in a address there becomes a space. Since a space can’t be used in a tag, it makes for a good delimiter. I tried that syntax on a whim and it works beautifully.
Unfortunately, I haven’t found a way to request links with “css” OR “design”. I would hope that will be added too eventually. Perhaps like this:
http://del.icio.us/tag/css,design
or
http://del.icio.us/tag/css;design
And who knows? Maybe you can exclude tags eventually…
http://del.icio.us/tag/design+-interior
or perhaps like this:
http://del.icio.us/tag/design+!interior
Meaning, list all links with the tag “design” but not with the tag “interior”.
While I’m wishing, I wish DIU supported quoted tags that allowed a space. That would let me associate proper first and last names of people with links. I suppose I could do it with a hyphen instead or just mash the names together, but I’d rather not. Flickr lets you tag images with spaces in the tag name since they support quoted tags.
After writing this whole thing up, I noticed that when you view a particular user’s tags, you get a list of “related” tags that you can add to the existing view to further filter the list. This reveals the use of the “+” operator, but they don’t list those related tags when viewing them at the global level. So just tweak the URL yourself if you want to filter those tags.
Here’s a thought.
What if Gmail were not just another free e-mail service. What if it were the world’s first e-mail service that paid you for using it?
An intriguing idea, no?
Where is that remote? A valid and common question most of us have probably posed at one time or another.
And yet, no good solution. Well, there probably is one out there for $19.95 or something, but I haven’t seen it. And chances are anything out there would involve me replacing my beloved TiVo remote with some substandard chunk of plastic.
So what to do? Well, I understand the TiVo folk are hard at work engineering Series3, so if it’s not too late, may I make a wee suggestion?
WiFi-enable the TiVo Series3 remote. Why? Let me count the ways:
I hope there’s more at work in the Series3 than HDTV. Thanks to the TiVo Hacks book, there’s already a nice wishlist of what people want to do with their TiVo’s. With HDTV’s resolution, it wouldn’t be out of the question to enable web browsing on the thing. Or reading e-mail. A small-footprint, wireless keyboard with builtin trackpad/trackball/thumbpoint device would be ideal for this. As if I don’t spend enough time on my couch as it is…
And here are some other thoughts I have related to the nextgen TiVo.
After another hour or so of shovelling snow from my driveway, it dawned on me that there might be a good All-American solution to being snowed in.
I joked today with Georgia that we should call Domino’s and order a pizza. Knowing full well that they couldn’t possibly deliver to us, considering the state of our driveway. And then… it occurred to me that they probably have terrible business at times like this. And it happens several times each winter.
Why not turn that weakness into an advantage? I say they should have their drivers operating trucks with snow plow equipment! Imagine… instead of trudging around, shoveling snow, you could just order up a pizza. In 30 minutes or less, your problem is solved and you’ve got a tasty lunch.
I’d expect the pizza company could even charge another $20 or so for it, but imagine how many pizzas they’d sell if they were running that kind of winter service! And everyone would know who to call. No plowing without pizza though — can’t have that. Gotta sell those pies.
