Blog management

There are many ways to host a blog : it can be

• use a dedicated service like WordPress.com, Bloggers …
• install the application on a general hosting provider
• install the application on you home computer and host it yourself

Each solutions have pro and cons. I won’t debate this, just point out that over the years, your blog will move.

As long as your old blog is still hosted and its URL remains valid, it isn’t much a problem. But even so, wouldn’t it be great to keep the whole history in one place ? For example it would allow you to search for a keyword or category and have all the results in one place.

So, since a blog is a little bit structured, it is feasible to export/import from one host to another all the content and almost all the metadata.

It is just that the applications are missing, at least in the OSS world.

There are a few progress :

• WordPress provides an good import/export feature.
• wordpress2blogger by Yichao. Ongoing discussion here.

But it would make more sense to have a stand alone application which would import/export/synchronize to different blog platforms and hosts. Maybe with the progress of Atom/feeds libraries like ROME or Abdera and individual work like Yichao did, it will become a reality.

Wait and see …

Bookmarks question

Like many old web user, I have to struggle with a long old list of bookmarks, that has been from local to Delicious tag mess, to Google Bookmark … and, like Dora the Explorer, it may be the time to “stop and think”. Or stop and google for other people solutions …

So now, I felt almost happy with Google Bookmark and the GMark extension. Just seeking a way to automatically classify those bookmarks.

During all those research I found that there are finally some changes going on. Most notably Firefox 3 will feature a new system for storing bookmarks, history, and other information about pages : Places. The link goes to the Wiki where a lot of discussions goes on and there are links to references on the subject.
References :

• Places covers much of the design and user-interface of Places. (Goals & Objectives, overview …)
• Firefox/Feature Brainstorming:Bookmarks long list of ideas and references.
• Places:Bookmarks:Rethinking : describe some potential future directions for Places. UI related stuff and screenshots.
• Bookmarks Use Cases : lots of ideas, too many ?
• Search “bookmarks” on MozillaWiki.

How Tech Writing Sucks: The Five Sins

How Tech Writing Sucks: The Five Sins
A very good article and resources from Amy Hoy Slash7 (an informally educated designer-turned-interface-developer who also programs).
Just read it and have fun.

Automatic bookmark classification

I am really searching a way to automatically classify my bookmarks, but it looks like there are not a lot of resources and I doubt that I would have time to go into personal developments …
Still here are some starting points :

• HyperBK Firefox Extension : “automatic classification of the bookmarks into their correct bookmark folder” but doesn’t look very active and provide many others stuffs.
• Firefox/Feature Brainstorming:Bookmarks : The wiki page about firefox’s bookmarks.
• Collaborative Bookmark Classifier — CariBo : Really close to what I seek ! Seems to be dead however.
• BINGO : Bookmark-Induced Gathering of Information with Adaptive Classification into Personalized Ontologies : is exactly what I want, but development stopped in 2004.
• Connotea : is Open Source and have a Web API. It is one of the few of this kind.
• A personal agent for bookmark classification : a BibSonomy entry, but I can’t find where is the content ??
• Automatically Organizing Bookmarks per Contents : Academic paper almost 10 years old, guess that if they Open Sourced it they would have more follow up
• Automated Categorization of Web Resources : What it is about ??
• Patronizing : this guy has the same kind of interests.
• CAT.INST>FR trying to sell a paper about it : A rough set-aided system for sorting WWW bookmarks