03 February 2005

5 years, 5000 bookmarks

Actually, it's only 4 years and 3 months since I started using Powermarks to manage my bookmarks. (Before that I used the browser's useless built-in bookmarking feature.) Today I've added my 5000th bookmark. 5 years just sounded better. That averages to about 4 a day, or just under 30 a week.

So what have I been bookmarking? I thought I'd do a trip down memory lane. Here's a snapshot of 4.25 years of internet time, and a reflection of what I've found interesting at the time. Note that the following indicates when I bookmarked something, not when it was actually published.

Bookmarked in 2000 — Starting 22 October

Essentials

• Universal Currency Converter
• Streetmap
• Motley Fool
• Epicurious

Gurus

• 37Signals – No less so in 2005
• Creative Good – Still often quote their customer experience papers
• XPlane – First spotted in Business 2.0 magazine
• Praystation
• Evolt
• A List Apart
• Web Standards Project, a.k.a. the WaSP
• Happy Cog (More precisely Jeffrey Zeldman, probably bookmarked well before 2000)

Skills & principles

• CSS2 specification
• WebAble, still a good accessibility resource
• IBM Ease of Use – rather outdated usability principles
• Flash usability

Fun/weird

• Lambiek's comic artist encyclopaedia
• Sodaplay – Java stick insects that go boing
• Responsive face
• Memepool – The usual answer to "Where do you get all these weird links?".
  The brainchild of Joshua Schachter, who in 2004 released delicious, a better answer to that question today.

Bookmarked in 2001

Trends

2001 was marked by lots of negativity and cynicism.

• eNormicon by 37signals –"Is your company having an e-dentity crisis? Then you need the eNormicom Image Bucket Program™..."
• Dack's web economy bullshit generator
• Dilbert's mission statement generator
• Writing internet worms for fun and profit – Hmm
• Freelancing tips – Hmmmm

Strangely, nothing bookmarked about 9/11. Although I did start blogging in the same month, only to abandon blogging in late 2003.

Gurus

• Adaptive Path – Clever people
• Eric Meyer – Wrote the book non CSS
• Christina Wodtke – IA doyenne
• Jukka Korpela – 10 times as pedantic as me
• Ferry Halim's Orisnal – inimitable Flash games. (Actually, widely imitated.)
• Brewster Kahle, creator of the Internet Archive, a.k.a. the Wayback Machine. (It's much more than that.)

Skills & principles

• Flazoom – Flash usability
• Web design patterns – as in archetypal design elements, not as in wallpaper
• Zooming User Interfaces (ZUIs), and another demo. This struck a chord after reading Jef Raskin's Humane Interface, but they never really found public applications, besides Relevare.
• CSS-related:
  • Microsoft CSS Gallery – The reason why the CSS Zen Garden (2003) was necessary
  • CSS Layout Techniques for Fun and Profit – Eric Costello, who went from teaching us to use CSS to building Flickr.com a couple of years later
  • Bluerobot's CSS layout reservoir
  • Owen Briggs's little boxes – more layout lessons
  • Tantek Çelik: The box model hack – made it all possible

Fun/weird

• What's your pokéname? [As for me: You can throw ice bolts. You can puke iron filings. You can resist nunchucks. You can swim in air. You can shoot tahini. You can throw lightning bolts. You can spit bricks. You can walk on maple syrup. ]
• The 5k awards – Here's the 2001 winner, Timepiece
• Corpses for sale
• Symphony for dot matrix printers
• Willing-to-try – Flash e-learning with beautiful animation
• Comics by Jim Woodring
• Radial Pong
• Cartoon laws of physics – LAW 1: Any body suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of its situation.

Bookmarked in 2002

Trends

• ArsDigita: From Start-Up to Bust-Up – A classic dotcom crash story. (Philip Greenspun, founder of ArsDigita, would've featured under Gurus for 1999.)
• The first google blog – Following Google becomes an obsession. A better blog in 2005 is InsideGoogle.
• Allmusic.com music encyclopaedia – Still can't live without this, despite the awful redesign in 2004. This was particularly useful as the company MP3 server meant a lot more interesting new music was playing.
• Open.gov launched
• 2002 was my most enthusiastic blogging phase
  • Inspired by this article, and trying to do my bit for typography on the web, I did some research into extended character support across browsers, summarised in this table.
  • And produced some Dreamweaver extensions that made Dreamweaver 4 output valid XHTML, and use the correct extended character codes. (Both made obsolete by MX). This got a nod from Zeldman, my 15 seconds of fame.
  • My longest article, still maintained, listing all the bookmarklets I use.
  • On the home front, we bought our flat.
• October 10 – Wired News redesigned using standards-compliant XHTML with CSS positioning. This proved to the rest of us it was possible.

Gurus

• Brainjar – CSS and DHTML tutorials
• Stopdesign – Doug Bowman, undisputed king of CSS, responsible for the Wired redesign
• Jesse James Garrett's Elements of User Experience (Perhaps more often mentioned than used)
• Second Story – Inspirational web design, including the amazing Theban Mapping Project from August 2002. When they refer to their portfolio as collected works, they mean it.

Skills

• NYPL style guide by Zeldman
• Economist style guide
• Guardian style guide
• The Trouble With EM 'n EN – The pain of typography on the web
• AIFIA – Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture
• 'Click here': Needless words – Very useful words
• Identifont – Amazingly effective way to identify a font, based on heuristics (answering a lot of questions)
• "There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain" a.k.a. Lorem ipsum

Fun/weird

• The Simpsons Archive – Staggeringly complete. The internet at its best.
• At the Star Wars Cantina – Groan
• Where do you find new music? – Informative conversation on Metafilter
• si siht tahw sseug nac uoY – elgooG
• The Canonical List of WEIRD Band Names

Bookmarked in 2003

Trends / significant sites

• Samuel Pepys 17th-century diary relaunched as a blog, gaining massive press coverage and probably doing a lot to popularise the word blog.
• February 2003 – BBC News redesigned. For a reminder of how it used to look, see the BBC article about the Pepys diary above.
• Who owns the alphabet? – according to Google
• ADSL Guide – Shopping around for DSL (finally got it on 30 March '03 – has it been that long?)
• April 2003 – a wonderful trip to Japan
• Sitepoint – Excellent web design magazine relaunches with pure CSS/XHTML design – arguably taking the mantle from Alistapart
• All blogs start sporting flock wallpaper
• Looking into photo album sites: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. – all to become irrelevant in a year's time with Flickr
• A plan for spam, by Paul Graham – Written in 2002, bookmarked in 2003, software using this method (Bayesian filtering) now saves me from hundreds of spams a week
• Karova – the first accessible e-com engine

Skills / work

• Book recommendations from the staff of Boxes and Arrows. (Hmm, I've only read 12 of them)
• What is a controlled vocabulary? – on Boxes and Arrows
• Hide CSS from browsers – first bookmarked table of CSS hacks. Subsequently replaced by first Centricle, then Dithered
• PNG opacity in Win/IE – Finally applied this knowledge in mid 2004
• I finally understood CSS floats
• The best bookmarklets on the web
• Ingenious skiplinks technique, subsequently used on all our sites

Weird / fun / art

• Who would buy that – eBay oddities
• The macabre Flash animations of Han Hoogerbrugge
• Joel-Peter Witkin - Love & Redemption – A favourite photographer (speaking of macabre)
• Creepy eyeballs
• Loobylu – One of the cutest blogs around
• This year's comic link – Small Stories, especially this one
• The dullest blog in the world. Sadly defunct, but from 2004 Wank du Jour bravely kept the tradition alive
• These Weapons of Mass Destruction cannot be displayed
• Cool minimalist shockwave games

Bookmarked in 2004

Trends / events / significant sites

• London bloggers network
• Web Standards Awards
• UK political hacking gathers momentum: Downing Street Says, MySociety, and best of all, They Work For You
• Cool timelines on BBC news: Race to Mars, Washington Sniper, Investigating Al Qaeda
• May 2004 – Nigritude Ultramarine – the SEO challenge
• Search engine relationship chart
• 4 June – Bookmarked flickr.com
• 21 June – Bookmarked del.icio.us
• They have a lot in common – Folksonomies, bookmarked 31 December 2004
• July 2004 – Bookmarked BugMeNot. Online newspapers in crisis
  • We Don't Need No Stinkin' Login – Wired
  • Another good summary – In the comments, BugMeNot's creator says "So essentially newspaper sites are deliberately flogging dud data to their advertisers at the cost of our time"
  • Required-user-registration debate continues
  • BusinessWeek interview – "On the typical registration-blocked news site, there is ZERO incentive for me to keep my account information private. That's why BugMeNot works!"
• Why can't a newspaper be more like a blog?
• BBC to Open Content Floodgates – BBC Creative Archive approaching, hopefully launching during 2005
• What's your favorite MP3 Blog? Or just check the MP3 blog aggregator
• Comment spam sweeps the web (My paused blog gets hammered by hundreds a week, sometimes hundreds within the space of minutes, although a moderation system prevents them from being published.)

Skills / work

• April 2004 – The DRC publishes their long-awaited web accessibility report – available only in PDF and RTF. "An HTML version will be available on this website shortly" they say. Still.
• Websites fail disabled articles spring up everywhere. (Although Wheel's article on the subject's been around since November 2003)
• I don't care about accessibility either. "Because when Web design is practiced as a craft, and not a consolation, accessibility comes for free."
• Summary of CSS image replacement techniques
• The ultimate CSS 3-col layout?
• Modern browser bugs explained in detail!
• Douglas Bowman | Web Essentials 30 September 2004 | Sydney
• Online Flash-based font browser – Browse and try out the fonts installed on your system. Clever. But I recommend The Font Thing instead. Indispensable.
• November 2004: US Elections

Weird / art / fun

• Language genius:
  • Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity – - In Words of Four Letters or Less
  • This Is the Title of This Story, Which Is Also Found Several Times in the Story Itself – Recursive metatext
  • J.R.R. Tolkien's Silmarillion in one thousand words
  • and still my favourite, bookmarked in April 2001, Growing a Language – computer programming explained in words of one syllable
• A sense of scale – Keep things in perspective
• Ishkur's Guide to Electronic music
• Animals on the Underground
• Group Hug
  Sample: "I didn't walk out of the theater when I watched legally blonde. It was a crappy movie, but I wanted my money's worth. I feel so horrible, I still have nightmares."
• Pencil carving, and pit carving
• The 100 Worst Porn Movie Titles
• Bash.org IRC quotes – Samples:
  <th0m> have you ever had a booger that looked like it was designed by h. r. giger"
  "<cia> sometimes being a man is having to say you like michael jackson songs."
  "<Shiningun>the day peoples faces start looking like ^_^ in real life is tha day i buy a flamethrower"

Bookmarking tips

I strongly advise anyone whose life/career involves the internet somehow to use a keyword-based bookmark manager. As long as you cultivate a habit of bookmarking anything you've found interesting, you have the equivalent of a perfect memory, if you ever want to find something again. (Google is very useful in this respect, but not infallible.) Powermarks is wonderful, for 3 key reasons:

1. Bookmarks are tagged with keywords, rather than filed hierachically (like the default browser bookmarks system). This way, you can easily find a needle in a haystack of 5000 bookmarks.
2. Bookmarks are synchronised to a server on the internet , so I contribute to the same bookmarks database whether I'm at work or at home.
3. Fast "find as you type" search interface

However, Powermarks is no longer your only option. Del.icio.us is a free internet-based service that offers (1) and (2) above, and has the additional advantage of being a "social" system, so you can see what others are bookmarking, and who has similar interests to you. I'm still wishing somebody would write a utility that'll allow me to synchronise Powermarks with a del.icio.us account. And while it's at it, simultaneously save them permanently on Furl, and locally using WWWoffle.