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Simon Willison’s Weblog

Blogmarks

This entry was going to be another list of links, together with a note about how much I really needed to set up a separate link blog. Then I realised that it would make more sense just to set one up so that’s exactly what I’ve done. I still need to implement the archive but it’s getting dark so I’m posting this and heading home.

My main points of inspiration were Paul Hammond’s bookmark store, Mark Pilgrim’s b-links, Anil Dash’s Daily Links and Jason Kottke’s Remaindered Links. Since there didn’t seem to be any naming convention I decided to call them blogmarks, which isn’t a new term but doesn’t seem to have a widely accepted meaning yet either.

The system is powered by a simple bookmarklet. To make things a little more interesting I’m capturing the referral information and using it to automatically generate the ’via’ link; since the title of the previous page isn’t available in Javascript I extract is using a server side script instead. I swayed briefly between using page extracts a la Hammond or sarcastic commentary a la Pilgrim and decided that commentary would be far more fun.

Posted 24th November 2003 at 12:52 am

This is Blogmarks by Simon Willison, posted on 24th November 2003.

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20 comments

  1. The sarcastic commentary is half the fun! More than half, really.

    Mark - 24th November 2003 03:28 - #

  2. So now the actual blogmarks aren't there yet? That sucks. :)

    Manuzhai - 24th November 2003 07:18 - #

  3. Do you plan to have an RSS Feed of these Blogmarks? Most visitors don't go through the front page and will miss your blogmarks.

    I am currently facing this issue on my own weblog and I notice that I get more visitors to the feed than to the front page!

    Kayode Okeyode - 24th November 2003 08:02 - #

  4. Never heard of Blogmarks before. Couldn't find the link page either - oops perhaps not looking properly! There's a PHP site that you may be interested in www.flyingchair.net. This guys links show who links to him and who links out (incoming/outgoing) - maybe useful to anyone interested....

    Giles - 24th November 2003 08:05 - #

  5. Good stuff. The only problem is that the links are quite hard to read as they are. They just run into each other.

    GaryF - 24th November 2003 11:53 - #

  6. I knew someone was going to ask about an RSS feed ;) I'll add it to the list. I'll play around with the styles and see if I can make them more readable, but I'm keeping the inline list because there simply isn't room for them anywhere else on the front page.

    Simon Willison - 24th November 2003 15:55 - #

  7. How will you deal when you'll have dozens of URI in the blogmarks ? You could add a Blogmarks Archive button in the Blogmarks span and/or the This Site navigation. Whatever, that's a great feature.

    P01 - 24th November 2003 16:46 - #

  8. As for RSS feeds... I emailed you about this at the mail address listed on this page a while ago, but as I never got an answer, I take it you either never got it or forgot about it.

    Anyway.. what I really miss having an RSS feed of is the comments here!
    While of course the posts are interesting, I tend to missing out a lot of useful comments that is made because I only use the RSS feed and don't see the web page. A feed for the comments would be great..

    And yes, this is off topic, but as mentioned, I tried email first

    Eivind Lie Nitter - 24th November 2003 19:15 - #

  9. I'm using a similar tool of my own. But I don't see it as a blog, because I can delete the entries after I'm done with them. It is more of a online bookmark "queue" than blogmarks.
    But having "blog" in new words is apparently very fashionable ;-)

    I'm not sure you want to actually share these via RSS. At least in my case, this queue is private and is meant for pages I need to read. Whereas a blog is more about things you have read and want to share...

    But I love using this online queue in combination with blogs (and the free bloglines.com aggregator). It allows a two pass blog reading: first pass is to select the ones that you'll want to read and the second one is actually spending the time to read them ;-)

    Dumky - 24th November 2003 22:01 - #

  10. Simon, not to be off-topic or anything, but in this new design, after the referals end, the green background ends, and white continues for the rest of the page. It's somewhat disconcerting. Maybe setting html, body {background} to whatever this colour is would solve that?

    Lach - 25th November 2003 01:32 - #

  11. Hmm... I'm not seeing that in my browser but I'll add a background colour to HTML as well just to be sure.

    Simon Willison - 25th November 2003 01:44 - #

  12. Heh. Welcome to the club: http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/001085.htm l Jeremy

    Jeremy Zawodny - 25th November 2003 02:06 - #

  13. I'm not sure you want to actually share these via RSS. At least in my case, this queue is private and is meant for pages I need to read. Whereas a blog is more about things you have read and want to share...

    Good Point! In my case, the headlines are typically items I wish to blog about either now or in the future; if I don't get to blog on them, I use them as "related news" for items on which I am currently blogging on (a sort of "external memory" to borrow a phrase). At worst, they are public bookmarks which I wish to share.

    Kayode Okeyode - 25th November 2003 08:25 - #

  14. Very nice Simon, I'm finding them to be compulsive reading! Are they archived? And a separate web front-end available?

    Oh, and if you would post the code that would be great as I'd like something very similar...

    Peter Bowyer - 25th November 2003 09:06 - #

  15. I like it.

    Lars - 25th November 2003 17:45 - #

  16. Nice! Simon could you post the bookmarklet you used. Also would be nice if you could explain how you implemented the Blogmark system - I really wanna know!

    Hmm... Let me take a guess at how you're doing it. You set up a new blog, and your bookmarklet is just a "standard" BlogThis! type bookmarklet with the necessary tweaks. Is that right?

    Cheah Chu Yeow - 28th November 2003 05:46 - #

  17. Actually I ended up coding the whole application from scratch. It's pretty simple - there's a single "bookmarks" table with fields for linktitle, linkurl, commentary, viaurl, viatitle, a unique ID and the date/time the blogmark was added. The bookmarklet simply opens a popup window that looks like this, sending the various bits of information to the script that generates the form as query string variables. The exception is the viatitle field which the server itself has to find out (by retrieving the HTML from the viaurl page and parsing out the title tag) - this is because Javascript doesn't provide a way of finding the title of the referring page.

    Simon Willison - 28th November 2003 06:02 - #

  18. Simon could you post the bookmarklet you used. Also would be nice if you could explain how you implemented the Blogmark system

    I've just reverse-engineered Simon's Blogmarks system for my own site. I posted a few pointers about how I did it, including the bookmarklet and the PHP script to get a title from the referrer URL.

    Simon - I also called my collection of links Blogmarks - hope you don't mind.

    Richard Rutter - 8th December 2003 12:53 - #

  19. Your bookmarklet is almost identical to mine :) I have no problem with you or anyone else using the term "blogmarks" - in fact the more people who use it the less likely I'll have to explain what it means to anyone.

    Simon Willison - 8th December 2003 16:45 - #

  20. While I still tend to leave browser windows open for days at a time [...]

    I thought I was the only one, but I use tabs... dozens of tabs.

    sean - 26th August 2004 03:29 - #

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