As a friend of mine tends to say, I really like getting into the "code monkeyism" aspect of working online. Once I get my head buried in a project, I will forsake just about any other endeavor until it's complete. One project I want to start is a different kind of bookmarking site than what's been offered online so far.

Previous Projects

The first major project I completed (there are others I'm not at liberty to discuss) was "ConnectContent". I operated the site at the dot com version of the URL until I turned it over to other people. The reason I ran it was to make sure it worked — I absolutely hate something that only works part of the time or isn't as efficient as it could be. Unfortunately, the programmer who is now making changes to it is breaking things as fast as he fixes them. Oh well, it's not my baby anymore.

The second project is "Post Your Own Articles". It's a specific kind of multi-author blog I will never give up willingly. I have taken more than three years of experience with writing, search engine optimization and other things and pushed it into a site in which I spend most of my time reviewing articles written by other people. Every once in a while, I'll even add an article of my own.

A New Project?

Time willing (my wife demands a lot of my time now), I want to create a bookmarking site that does exactly what I want it to do. There are hundreds of bookmarking sites, both social and otherwise, and not one of them does exactly what I want it to do.

One of the problems with bookmarking sites is that once they become known as "marketing friendly", some unscrupulous Internet marketers will spam them and abuse them to the point where they become worthless in the eyes of the search engines. By the way, I'm an Internet marketer too, but I refuse to resort to tactics that cause more problems than they solve.

Some of the popular bookmarking software, designed for websites, are software packages like Scuttle, ScuttlePlus, Pligg and PhpDug. Then there are sites and software packages, designed to be ran from a PC, geared to exploit bookmarking sites which use any of the popular bookmarking software packages.

If and when I get around to creating my own bookmarking site, I'll probably give the software away so that others can duplicate the site I create. I'm not 100 percent sure I'm going to do it, but I really want to and the reason is simple: I have more bookmarks in my browser than any normal human should ever have. A lot of them are temporary, as sites I want to go back to finish reading or whatever, but the majority of them are permanent. My bookmarks are highly organized and if I lose the backup for them, I would be completely lost.

Browser Start Pages and Tab Management

I've examined two, of what are probably just two of many, browser start page websites which allow sharing. One is older, called "Homepage Startup". The second one is called "Speedtile". What does each of these sites have in common? They both take snapshots of the sites bookmarked and use JavaScript drag-n-drop features so you can move them around. I'm sorry, it just seems like overkill to me. I would rather have a kind of personal directory, broken down by categories and tags (and searchable, of course) so that I can quickly find the bookmark I'm looking for, regardless of how deeply it's nested. The fancy graphics and interactivity sites use to make things look attractive seem to require more time to set up (my preferred directory structure, even if it's limited) than they're worth, in my opinion.

I checked out Cluster Tabs, and it's a nice concept, but it seems to be mostly tied to the Firefox browser. What if I want to use it with Google Chrome? I'm not sure about anything outside of Firefox because I stopped using it after testing it. Cluster Tabs is supposed to make tab management easier, but I found it actually made it harder, at least for me.

A Problem Looking for a Solution or a Solution Looking for a Problem?

The one and only reason I'm contemplating a specific kind of bookmarking site is because I don't always have access to my own desktop PC, or even my netbook (when using a PC at an Internet cafe).

Despite my desire to have my bookmarks accessible everywhere, and being able to share them as I deem fit, I refuse to create something that doesn't solve my problem. If it's something that works for me, I'm sure it will work for someone else. Anything less isn't a project worth doing.

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