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Posted February 5, 2007 - 6:42pm by Erwan Loisant
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The blog module being pretty stable now, just requiring bug fixes and incremental improvements, I have been spending some time on the “online favorites” part, both on the engine and the user interface. “Online favorites” means social bookmarks websites, such as Delicious.
As you may know, we introduced nested folders to our favorites model; it gave us an opportunity to rethink the way we work with online favorites services, and I ended up rewriting almost everything from scratch. So, what do we have now?
You could rush to your Cormorant build, but the user interface being still in progress I would only recommend it to people who would be able to read the source code. But trust me: the engine is ready, and make the interface is just a matter of deciding what to show and write a few lines of XUL. (Maybe in one week or two, we will have a user interface providing enough functionalities for power users to test it.) In short, here are the major changes:
- The services are more visibles in the interface. Rather than choosing an option such as “share with everyone”, you will see an option saying “publish to del.icio.us”.
- There is a better distinction between local favorites and online favorites. We had reports that some users were accidentally deleting online bookmarks because they thought they were working on a local clone. This confusion will now be avoided, and your data will be safer.
- In the search fly-out (the search box on the right of the url bar), online favorites will have a distinct visual showing on which service they are published.
- You don’t have to set a “default” service to publish to. You can set up one delicious account and one shadows account, and choose where to publish to when you star a page. Publish to Delicious? To Shadows? To both? You choose, each time if you want. It also works with several accounts on the same service if you’re a real social bookmarking geek.
- Using Shadows as an example was not a mistake: we now have support for Delicious, Shadows and Magnolia. I know we announced that we were dropping Shadows because of the lack of support from Pluck, but the code became simple enough to write a Shadows module even if Shadows.com’s future is uncertain. As long as Shadows.com is usable, it will be usable in Flock. Magnolia support has been added because it’s a great service and we want to offer as much choice as possible to Flock users.
There is still one point where I am still wondering what the best user interface would be: the “Favorites” menu (still called “Bookmarks” in Cormorant, but this will be fixed). You will be able to access your online favorites from the favorites manager, the search box and of course the website of your service. But I don’t think it’s enough to really integrate online favorites in the browser.
We need a quick way to access online favorites, and the obvious location for that would be in the Favorites menu. But since these favorites are not organized as a tree but with tags, how would you represent that in a menu? Would you show your most used tags as pseudo-folders? Show only the recent favorites rather that the whole list?
I have a few ideas but I would love to hear what other people have to say about it. Blogged with Flock
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I would love for the favorites menu to show my top-level tags as pseudo-folders.
All of my top-level tags contain hyphens so they are pretty easy to identify.
Another option is to allow the user to select a character to use as the first character of top-level tags. So that each user can use their own system.
We definitely have to allow the same bookmark to show up in multiple folders. This is key to the concept of tagging.
Hi Erwan
Really like the new approach to favorites, although I have to say that there are still some merits to a favorites/bookmarks sidebar, one of which would be the ability to easily add it to the blog sidebar, so that you can drag and drop in links you are blogging about.
The handling/display of tags though is something that needs a bit of careful consideration. Most used tags != most used bookmarks and not being able to easily access all your bookmark tags from the menu items might become off putting over time.
I still loved the approach you had in 0.5, where you had the sidebar and was able to display you favorites by folder (then collection) or tag.
Presently, I have found myself installing and using on a regular basis the del.icio.us sidebar which does a good job of displaying your bookmarks by tag.
If the searchbar was able to directly search favorites based on tag, this again would be quite useful (although how you would decide which 4 favorites would appear in the list if you have 20 all just tagged the same I do not know).
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mc as in scottish not hammer
Showing tags as folders would be ideal, I think. I agree with tones about the usefulness of a sidebar. If we're only showing the most frequently used tags as folders, it might also be useful to have an interface that lets you search-as-you-type by tag. Maybe the search widget does this, but I'm thinking more and more that there needs to be some way of getting at this via the favorites menu as well; I worry that people tend to segment features and will continue to think of the search box as a tool for searching web sites only.
This is all very exciting. I've been using the delicious bookmarklet for some time now because I wasn't sure how stable the trunk builds' implementations of favorites were.
Can you set the browser to auto-publish to a service or two more than one service? This might be a nice backup mechanism.
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Flock Web Guy
About the tags as folders: that would be cool, and I think that's what Epiphany is doing. The problem is that some people may have hundreds of tags, so show everything will end up in a huge (thus unusable) list. So we we need to find a way to select the tags that will be top-level, for example the most used tags or a list that the user will select. Thank you for your suggestions about it, Luke.
Tones: we do have a Favorite sidebar in Cormorant, it just doesn't include online favorites right now (but it will). Have that in the blog editor is a great idea, since add a link to a blog post is always a bit painful.
Daryl: right now the auto-publish feature is not enabled, but yes, you will be able to auto-publish to more than one service. More precisely to more that one account, regardless whether the account is on a separate service or not.
Hi. Nice upgrade and inclusion of other browsers. However, are you going to make link "keywords" available somehow? In FFox you can set a keyword for any bookmark, and whenever you type that keyword in the URL line, and hit enter, you go to that bookmark automatically. It's a very useful feature, particularly for those of us who use the keyboard more than the mouse. I hope that, in your general advances with bookmarking, you don't take a step backward by dropping the keyword.
Hi Erwan,
As mctones said, the approach you had in the 0.5 was really good.
A sidebar showing the tags or folder, that offers as well a search engine with some results shown in a full-paged layout. That was really efficient I think.
Some system like shadows offer as well a screen capture of the spage bookmarked, that would be very nice if this interface should as well show this screen capture. This can look like a gadget, but I do think it is often the most efficient way to find back a page you've seen before.
btw : many thanks to maintain shadows !
Great news on the inclusion of Ma.gnolia support. Keep up the great work, Flocksters!
I would really like to view my online favs from my flock-favs-menu. Will be happy if I get an option to choose the tags that will be used as pseudo-fav-folders. Setting the most-used tags as pseudo-fav-folders can be given as the default option.
PS: I get really irritated if am not given a choice to make my own decisions. Even though I may rarely use it :)
How about using tags as criteria whether or not to include a bookmark into the respective folder.
Just like iTunes with SmartPlaylists... or SmartFolders in OS X for that matter.
For example I'd have a folder called "PS2 Games" which includes all bookmarks tagged "game" AND "PS2" AND "Playstation".
Or another folder named "News" which would include all bookmarks tagged "news" OR "CNN" OR...
The del.icio.us sidebar is a could starting point for bookmarking. however, that sidebar is still a little to slow to operate and the design was not optimum. Being able to drag and drop new links in the sidebar would be a huge improvement for example.
When not at home, I use the del.icio.us extension for Firefox. It basically lets you choose favourite tags, so you can configure the tag (or combination of tags) that you want to display as folders. It is quite like agaiz described for PS2 games.
The extension allows for some other things, like displaying the more recent bookmarks, sorting by date or by name... I would assume that you've already tried it, but if you heven't, it's a good source for inspiration.
i think it would be really useful if it was possible to put specific collections of favorites from the favorite manager on the favorite toolbar that when clicked would drop down with a list of all the links contained in the collection like you can in safari.
i absolutely adore flock and thats the only thing i miss about safari.
Hi, I'm Turkish science communicator.rüya tabirleri I like very very much Nature Podcast.
Congratulations!
Just downloaded Flock to test my website ..
But couldn't figure out something important .
Is there a reason why on the online favorite services only ma.gnolia and delicious are supported ? what about stumbleupon or others?
Isn't it an open feature who will let me add whichever service I desire?
Is the reason API related ?
I play the game every day to find you. And I buy a lot of cheap talisman online gold to give you. I want to retain you but now I think it is a waste. But I think you are my love forever!
You can try this new social bookmarks site. Tungaw.com