Collaboration

Have you ever been bitten by the apparent disconnect between the various groups involved in a technical implementation for a customer?  A colleague and good friend of mine (thanks, Tim!) shared this with me yesterday, and I found it quite humorous and—unfortunately—all too accurate for many organizations.  Have a look; I suspect you’ll find it rather amusing as well:

http://dotnet.org.za/photos/ernst/images/45781/original.aspx

How true it is…

The idea behind del.icio.us is great, but for me it becomes truly useful using a “rich client” instead of a web browser.  For a long time, Cocoalicious has been that “rich client,” offering a combination of native Mac OS X technologies with the web services offered by del.icio.us.  Unfortunately, it appears as though Cocoalicious is no longer under active development, and so I’ve gone seeking other solutions.

There are quite a few bookmark managers out there for the Mac, but not so many that offer integration with del.icio.us.  Likewise, there are a number of utilities that offer to make posting to del.icio.us easier (Pukka and Postr come to mind) but don’t necessarily offer the bookmark management functionality upon which I rely.  So far, I’ve only found two applications that have the right balance of functionality.

The first of these is WebnoteHappy.  It looks as if WebnoteHappy originally started out as “just” a bookmark manager; del.icio.us support seems to be an add-on rather than an integral part of the application itself.  Nevertheless, WebnoteHappy does have a couple of things going for it:

• It supports integration with NetNewsWire, my RSS reader, so that I can post URLs directly from NNW’s context menu.  (Currently, only Cocoalicious, Pukka, Postr, and WebnoteHappy appear to be supported.)
• It supports AppleScript.
• It supports Smart Folders to group bookmarks according to tags, description, or notes.

The best part of del.icio.us, to me, is the tags.  This is where WebnoteHappy seems to be the weakest.  I can’t browse my bookmarks by tags (although I could create a Smart Folder based on tags), there’s no tag autocompletion, and when posting to del.icio.us via WebnoteHappy from NNW I’m not given the option to assign any tags (indeed, I’m not even given the option to share the bookmark via del.icio.us).

The second application is a relatively new application; it’s called Socialist.  Socialist appears to be built from the ground up to be a “rich” del.icio.us client.  The relative immaturity of Socialist is showing up in some areas, though:

• No AppleScript support.
• No integration with NNW.  (Granted, the list of supported applications is fairly small, but this is a feature I use regularly.)

Fortunately, Socialist does support tags, and does provide a way to browse bookmarks via tags.  The current release doesn’t support browsing via multiple tags or tag autocompletion, but supposedly those features are in the next version of the software (which is due out soon).

Each application has its own unique strengths and weaknesses, and both are lacking some features that I would love to see:

• Growl support (to provide a Growl notification when a URL is successfully posted to del.icio.us)
• AppleScript support (so URL management tasks can be automated a bit more)
• Spotlight integration (ability to search URL and note text from the Spotlight menu)

Of course, I already mentioned browsing via tags (including the ability to select multiple tags and see only the bookmarks tagged with all the selected tags) and tag autocompletion.  If NNW integration isn’t possible, then the ability to at least pull the contents of the clipboard into the new bookmark sheets in each application would be good.  An entry on the Services menu would be handy as well.

Any other products out there I should be considering?  Anyone have any feedback on one of these two products?  I’d love to hear from real-world users on what they like or don’t like about either of these two applications.

I’ve written before about del.icio.us, and how I find it extremely helpful in marking useful information I’ve found on the Internet.  (Now we just need a way to keep those pages we’ve bookmarked because they were useful or helpful from suddenly disappearing and making our bookmarks invalid.)  In the last few weeks, though, I’ve noticed something odd: bookmarks are being added to my Inbox (the “links for you” section, where other del.icio.us users can save a bookmark for you that they think might interest you) that don’t appear to be related in any way to links that I normally bookmark.  Am I missing something, or is this the start of bookmark spam?

I’m pretty boring when it comes to links, actually.  Unlike some other users whose RSS feed of links I watch, my “linkstream” is pretty much focused around specific technology areas (virtualization, VMware, Active Directory, UNIX/Linux, Macintosh) and Christian topics.  That’s generally it.  So when other del.icio.us users start adding links to my Inbox for topics outside those general areas, it doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense to me.  I can certainly see the value of the del.icio.us Inbox; after all, everyone’s view of the World Wide Web is different, and someone else might be able to find information that I can’t find (or vice versa).  So I could see someone putting a link in my Inbox that had to do with Active Directory, UNIX/Linux integration, VMware, or a Christian topic (like an up and coming new Christian music artist or something).  Links that don’t really have anything to do with links that I normally track are just like e-mail messages hawking wares designed to augment portions of my anatomy…they are not useful, helpful, or otherwise valuable to me.  That makes them spam.

Is this just me creating a problem where one doesn’t exist, or are others also seeing the same trends?  And what steps are ones taking, if any, to protect against this?  (Admittedly, it is an extremely low-volume and lower-impact problem right now.  I seem to recall saying the same about e-mail spam years ago.)

Fortunately, the fix for Cocoalicious is really straightforward; simply go into the preferences, change the API URI to “https://api.del.icio.us/v1/”, click OK, then exit and restart the application.  All should be well after that.  (At least, it worked for me.)

However, this also means that if you have any scripts or WordPress plug-ins, you may have to modify those as well.  I have a plug-in that lists recent del.icio.us posts in the sidebar, and I’ll need to see if that plug-in (or the plug-in’s configuration) needs to be updated.

(Funny how a “little” thing like a URI can have a ripple effect like this.)

I’ve been wrestling with Technorati not indexing my weblog for quite a while now.  It appears that ever since I added Ultimate Tag Warrior to my weblog and moved the tags into the keywords portion of the weblog (instead of the posting body), Technorati stopped indexing the site.  It appears that the tags aren’t being added to the RSS and Atom feeds in the content, and therefore Technorati won’t properly index the site.

I could go back to putting the tags in the body of the posting, but I really don’t feel like it, and I like having them in the keywords portion of the posting.  Since the Technorati links weren’t returning any posts on my weblog, I’ve just removed the Technorati search links on the category and tag pages.  Perhaps that’s childish, or selfish, or whatever, but the links just don’t seem useful any more.

In addition, I’ve added links to search del.icio.us for related bookmarks when browsing the category pages, and I’ve added a link for subscribing to a category’s RSS feed.  Visitors now use the exact same links for both tags and categories to find related bookmarks and subscribe to the RSS feed.

Just for easy reference, each category’s RSS feed is available at the following URL:

http://blog.scottlowe.org/<category name>/feed

In addition, each tag’s RSS feed is available at the following URL:

http://blog.scottlowe.org/<tag name>/feed

By default, these URLs will return an RSS 2.0 feed.  To access an RSS 0.92 feed, add “/rss” to the end of each of these URLs.  There is no Atom feed for categories and tags just yet.  There is an Atom 1.0 feed for the overall weblog, though.

Since each category’s RSS feed is available from the category page, I’ve removed the links to the RSS feeds in the sidebar.

UPDATE:  I also added the plugin Tags in the Head to add tags as meta keywords in the header of each page.  This is a pretty handy plugin that also ties in nicely with Ultimate Tag Warrior.