Bookmarks and Furl
Mosaic, the first Web browser that supported images, came out in November 1993. It had a feature that allowed users to create a hotlist — a repository of “cool” links chosen by the user and maintained within the browser. Netscape, whose Navigator 1.0 was based on Mosaic code, appeared in December 1994 and dominated the browser market for the next few years. It adopted the hotlist feature and called it bookmarks; the idea remained the same. Microsoft, which didn’t have a browser of its own (in fact it had completely ignored the Web up to that point), brought out Internet Explorer 1.0 in August 1995, including the hotlist feature, now called favorites.
Mozilla, the open-source branch of Netscape Navigator, finally appeared as version 1.0 in May 2002. It, and its stand-alone version Firefox, sticks to the Netscape terminology: bookmarks.
Bookmarks (or favorites if you use Internet Explorer), are nice and useful things; they make it easy to find your way back to Web pages you’ve visited before. However, they also have their limitations; they’re hard to manage. If, for example, you regularly use different machines, or different browsers on the same machine, or even different operating systems on the same machine, bookmarks tend to become scattered all over the place and increasingly hard to use.
This is where a free Web-based bookmark manager such as del.icio.us comes handy: you open an account, then you add and organise your links, and if you feel like doing it, you can share them with other people. Keeping your links online makes them more accessible since you can use them wherever you happen to be. Very nice.
However, Web-based bookmark managers do not even begin to address a problem that afflicts all hyperlink lists: linkrot, the annoying tendency of URLs to disappear. Sites may vanish and take all their content offline. Webmasters may decide to reorganise their sites and present all their content under different URLs. Or you may find an interesting article on the New York Times; the Times offers free registration, but after a couple of days all articles disappear into the archives, and you have to pay to access the archives. So a link to the Times — whether on a Web page or as a bookmark — is always a tricky thing since you’ll be charged if you want to read it the week after next.
Furl solves these problems.
Furl is a free Web-based service that describes itself as a “web page filing cabinet,” and that’s exactly what it does: it doesn’t only save URLs, it copies whole pages and stores them for safekeeping, thus sidestepping any linkrot that may (and will) occur. It also offers a search feature, which makes it easy to find things among the filed pages and turns the the service into a valuable research tool.
To use Furl, you only need to sign up for an account and drag the Furl it! link to your browser’s toolbar. Once this is done, you can store pages within seconds simply by clicking on the Furl it! link in your browser.
While writing this piece, I furled the following two pages:
Browser timelines by Brian Wilson
A history of browsers by Peter-Paul Koch
Comments
Aaron Campbell :: September 13, 2004
Isn’t Furl fantastic? It’s one of my favorite web-based activities. It even spits out RSS feeds for any given archive, allowing students to receive Furled pages from the teacher and giving teachers the opportunity to keep track of their students’ bookmarking research activities. Excellent stuff that Furl.
Pketh — both del.icio.us and Furl offer XML feeds [Tawawa entry on feeds] — and feeds being feeds, they can be pulled onto Web pages given a Web server that supports the technology required to do it. Whoever suggested the slightly misleading name syndication (think of syndicated cartoonists and columnists here) probably had this in mind as the primary use of RSS. Here’s a Movable Type tutorial on Displaying an RSS Newsfeed on Your Site.
Aaron — very good idea. I’d love to hear about your experiences with students using Furl for research.
chriskk :: September 14, 2004
Hi all. Nice blog Rudolf!
Pketh - There are multiple ways to integrate Furl with your blog. Click on the Share tab along the top of the FURL site for a list of options.
If you play with the script that they provide, you can make it display only certain category of links or list a certain number of items. I think the default settings are to show all your FURL links regardless of category from the past x-number of days.
I use the script they provide to show a list of my Furl links in a sidebar of my blog. It’s setup to display FURL links depending on the category you’re visiting. An example is if you visit the Japan section in my blog, the sidebar on the right side will display Japan related FURL links.
URL to the Share Your Archive feature:
http://www.furl.net/shareSite.jsp
URL to a short blog post I wrote on how to integrate FURL with MovableType:
http://blog.oreno.org/archives/000403.html
chriskk :: September 14, 2004
I love that Subscribe thingy ↑ and your favicon.
:)
Trying to be. Someday …
The subscribe thingie is a Movable Type plugin. Comment notification, I feel, should be included in the core install of every weblogging package, but as far as I know it’s only Expression Engine that has it.
The favicon (that’s the red and white little graphic in your browser’s address bar, in case anyone’s wondering) is a bit of a copout — it only reads タ because タワワ didn’t fit within those 16 x 16 pixels. I like favicons because I usually have a whole bunch of Mozilla tabs open — favicons make it easier to go back to other pages.
chriskk :: September 15, 2004
I agree that it should be included as a standard feature. Makes it easier to keep conversations within blog comments going. If you didn’t have this function we might not be having this conversation. :)
Noticed on Jean Snow’s blog too, which I think is WP. Very nice. I better get cracking on adding it to my MT-based blog.
What did you use to create your favicon?
pketh :: September 15, 2004
Chriskk,
Reading it now - it’s certainly a lot for someone like me to digest :)
Thanks!!
Yes, Jean’s site runs on WordPress — he’s been saying lots of nice things about it.
I created the Tawawa favicon in Irfan View but found this app very hard to use. After much hair-pulling and teeth-gnashing I somehow managed to get a favicon with a transparent background out of it, but when I tried to repeat the process and use a transparent background with the Tsure-zure.net favicon, I couldn’t remember how I did it first time round and gave up. Looking for something else, I found the ICOformat Photoshop plugin, which is one sweet piece of work.
pketh :: September 16, 2004
ya, I used that .ICO format photoshop plugin too ~ it’s the best way to do it
Commenting on this entry is closed.
I remember first hearing serious things about del.icio.us when I was in Shanghai. One of the big reasons (from my understanding) that ppl use it for is as an easy way to keep up to date lists of notable links in a public place.
If you have the skill, you can integrate it into your MT template and use it as a sideblog. After hearing about it, I considered it myself but decided against the hassle.
does furl work the same way?