Talk:Places:Bookmarks:Rethinking

tags+notes

Personally, I just want Tags and Notes available. I'll use just about any UI I have to, without complaint. The screen shots on the wiki page look fine to me. Did I mention I REELY, REELY want to use Notes and Tags with Places?

Some ideas...

OK, I thought a little about that really nice approach... here are my topics:

notes

When a piece of a website is copied to "notes", I would love to have this piece of the note clickable and bringing me to more or less the same place on the webpage again. --Schoschi 17:40, 25 June 2006 (PDT)

The bookmark "inbox"

This section was not 100% clear to me %-/ What I got as unsolved problem was that users of the current bookmark system expect new bookmarks (star button) at the end of the list whereas you'd like to put them on top of the list for more dominant presentation to newbies. What about filing new bookmarks as nowadys at the end but giving all "star"-bookmarks an appropriate tag, eg new_quick_bookmark_by_star_button, thus the "new bookmarks" section works just as a filter over tags (kind of "saved query" like in TB) => both groups are satisfied. --Schoschi 17:40, 25 June 2006 (PDT)

hint and wizzard for upgrading users

We have no need for folders at all any more, as tags can do everything folders can do (if sub-tags are implemented!) but offer multiple hierarchies for one bookmark (eg golem.de in "news" and "software" and "hardware" and "price comparision"). We can get rid of all the dupes the folders were forcing us to produce! :-)

For people like me, having over 2MByte of bookmarks, it would be GREAT to have a kind of upgrade wizzard which does the following

1. take all folder names and copy (undo possible) or move (some users may fear semantic losses) them into the new invented tag field (including subfolders, using a really secure seperator (/ and : may be used in current folder names) ). Use a prefix like "folder:" so I know "hey, this was a folder until FB3" so I will find my way quickly (yes, this breaks find as you type, it's just a first rough idea *g*)
2. find all bookmarks with similar URL and consolidate all of them into a single bookmark
   1. each folder path as one tag
   2. use most recent "last call" and it's favicon
   3. in case one field (keyword / description...) is filled only in one of the old bookmarks, use this and go to next dupe. Elsewise ask user what to do (use one of them only, concatenate or (default) concatenate and manually edit AND a checkbox "same action for all 243 similar cases")
3. delete obsolete folder structure

--Schoschi 17:40, 25 June 2006 (PDT)

check bookmarks

As the main intention of the new places system is to promote the use of bookmarks, much more users will have to fight against permanent redirects which will become broken links. Moreover, not all sites are offering RSS and thus it would be great to get the fine old mozilla 1.7 (?) feature back: check bookmarks for changes. But in an user friedly and useful way:

• Setting those checks (update/broken) per bookmark or per folder/tag
• collect some places and perform any check only once (so not making a permanent setting)
• optional: Warn me if any bookmark (independet of setting) gets a new permanent redirect (usually some time later the old URL does not work at all any more)
• Optional: save the current content of a URL and mark it as changed only if more than xxx byte changed (important for generated content where date of creation will never work for update checks) and then highlight the differences

I did not find out the reason why this pretty cool feature was dropped when FF was created; a search of some 15mins revealed no good sources. In case the reason was that newbies were overwhelmed: We are now creating a complete new UI so this feature is not somehow squashed into an old UI, but it can be done in a really nice and neat way so everyone understands. And now, we want newbies to heavyly use bookmarks. --Schoschi 17:40, 25 June 2006 (PDT)

incremental search

I'd love to be able to search incremental. So first, show only places containing ".se" in their URL, then further reduce to those containing "uni" in title/description and then further filter to only those containing the tag "todo". Then save this as saved search. Maybe too sophisticated (=> extension) but maybe just another reason to use FF "places" instead of web2.0 pages (which are not able to do this to full extend, so searches including history) --Schoschi 17:40, 25 June 2006 (PDT)

Scrambled Notes about Bookmarks:Rethinking

First of all, it is a very nice proposal and contains many good solutions for new functions. Thank you.

• Chrome Hack: Hopefully, a link like this chrome://browser/content/bookmarks/bookmarksManager.xul will still show the bookmarks window in a tab and did not get lost in transition.
• Autolinks: I'm not so excited about it because all systems with automated population I know are never transparent. You never know when an item will appear and when it will suddenly disappears. I understand the intention but I'm not sure if it is reliable for the target group.
• Old Bookmarking System: worked actually well as flat list with manual tagging and annotating (see items at http://pubnotes.wordpress.com)! But having said that I'm glad to see that Firefox will provide support such as auto-complete for tags etc. so that random variations of tags can be avoided.
• STAR Button: single click bookmarking sounds great! But couldn't it be placed in the navigation toolbar just left from the URL? And could the down arrow be an option? If I mark text on a website and click the STAR button it should also copy the selected text to the notes or append it to existing notes.
• Inbox/to-do list: The to-do list would not be appropriate after I read a website and decide to bookmark it. I suppose I have to use a different way of bookmarking to avoid putting it in the Inbox. How you describe its function sounds more like the typical Recent rather than an Inbox. I hope all (new) bookmarks appear not only in Inbox, New Bookmarks, etc. but also (immediately) in the general bookmarks list so that I can use the simplest way and all new features are options.
• Archived Bookmarks: I have saved a large mount of bookmarks in an archive file because until v1.5 Firefox does not handle large amounts of bookmarks so well. Also I removed all icons because the overhead was much more than 50% of the total number of characters in each bookmark. I guess the handling of bookmarks has changed with 2.0 so it might not be necessary anymore. I wonder if this item should just be labeled "Bookmarks" and include all new bookmarks so that New Bookmarks is just a "selective view".
• Tags: Tag lists can grow really big and it takes a lot of time to scroll long vertical lists. Look at this example http://del.icio.us/Tdot/firefox and try to work with it. How much time does it take you to scroll? Anyway, I use tags primarily for search because it is actually a special kind of annotation!
• Old Description Field: I always missed the description field in the bookmarks manager because it could have been a good place for notes. But it is basically invisible. At least in the bookmarks manager. My solution for this problem was to change the title field manually and add tags and annotations using some separators : Title -- Tags ;; Annotations. This was so far very efficient for the existing bookmarking system. I guess it will become the new notes field.
• Notes: integration looks great! It should include the tags field! I change tags frequently when I do research and work on projects. Tags and notes are just different annotations. Can I choose between left or bottom as notes location? (May be floating?)
• Search: MUST include title, (URL: recommend), tags, and notes! When I use my bash script to search all fields of the bookmarks I get a small percentage of unintended results but I prefer this simplistic approach with one search field that is similar to Google's. Additional specifiers such as inurl, site, etc. are only used for advanced search.
• Viewing Tags: I'm not sure about its function. It seems to offer the tags list and show all bookmarks with the selected tag. It seems equivalent to an advanced search like "tags:firefox". If I bookmark a website that has Firefox in its title why should I enter it again as a tag? I'm using tags to improve findability not to build a perfect structure of tags. I mean I need to add as tag or in notes information that is not in the title field so that I can integrate this website into my personal map of associations and knowledge.
• Viewing Bookmarks: I'm wondering if a list style like del.icio.us bookmarks (e.g. http://del.icio.us/Tdot/firefox), Google's search results, or reddit's news items (http://reddit.com/) would be better than the table format. CSS would actually allow advanced users some hacking and personal adjustments.
• Viewing Notes: a del.icio.us like output seems here also a better solution and could integrate very well with bookmarks. To illustrate what I mean follow these two links: http://old.lirio.us/rubric/entries/tags/delirioussiteblog?long_form=1 http://old.lirio.us/rubric/entries/tags/delirioussiteblog The first link shows the complete item while the second link reduces it to the bookmark with a short summary. For Firefox I think three levels would be perfect: single line (bookmark + tags?), four lines (bookmark + tags + two lines of the notes), long form (incudes complete notes/annotations)
• Notes and Highlighting: It would be great if the text from notes would appear highlighted in the website when I revisit it. But this may interfere with manual notes. URLex could do the trick but I would like to have a copy of an interesting text snippet in my notes in case the link is broken some day.
• Editing of bookmarks, tags, notes: Having editable title, tags, and notes fields for the selected bookmark is excellent. But if the bookmarks would be listed as dynamic HTML page inline editing as it is used by del.icoi.us or by TiddlyWiki could be an option.
• Check Bookmarks (reply to above): Having a few thousand bookmarks dead links come up once in a while and are easily deleted when I notice the website is gone. But more importantly a server can be down temporarily and I do not want to loose important bookmarks by an automated bookmark cleaner.
• Incremental Search (reply to above): The problem with Firefox is only that it takes the search field as one string instead of a space separated list with a default AND operator. Also Mozilla/Firefox always destroyed the order of bookmarks so I wrote my own search as bash script that generates a dynamic HTML ant loads it in a Firefox tab (see http://pubnotes.wordpress.com/2007/10/14/firefox-search/).
• Smart Keywords: Currently, I can enter a bookmark like this http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=%s , add a keyword "ys", and use it to search yahoo from the URL bar, e.g "ys firefox". But if I just enter "ys" I get the search results for "%s". So, it would be great to delete "%s" before it is send to the server. Except, on the website is some text selected. Because in this case is should perform the search for the selected text.
• PermaLinks for bookmark searches: would be a wonderful tool for frequent tasks and combine it with all the possibilities for bookmarks (keyword, smart keyword, bookmarklet, bookmarks menu, bookmarks toolbar). It has the function of a "smart folder" (Mac) and could for example be used to show all bookmarks with the tag "project1". But unlike in directories ONE bookmark can appear in multiple "smart folders". The URL/link could look like this chrome://browser/content/bookmarks/bookmarksManager.xul?s=project1 chrome://browser/content/bookmarks/bookmarksManager.xul?s=%s

Tdot 2005-07-11, 00:41

Question

how do you access png's

Bookmarks rethink from my view

I'm writing my wishes and thoughts on the future bookmarks model, and hope it will influence someone. My spec comes from teh point of view that minimal interaction should be required. I think an add dialog should be abolished :)

It's here: User:Auk/Bookmarks.