Across desktops, laptops, work computers, etc managing your bookmarks can become a pain. I used to use a Firefox plugin called “Bookmarks Synchronizer”:https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/14/ and a free FTP service. But, having to download bookmarks on startup and upload them when they change got to be to annoying.

Eventually I stopped using it and got back into disorganized and multiple computer bookmark hell. This wasn’t good so I quickly sought a solution, and started using “del.icio.us”:http://del.icio.us/ . As it is too tedious to use the web interface to add bookmarks, the “Delicious plugin”:http://del.icio.us/help/firefox/extension is a must have, allowing you to go to your bookmarks and create a new bookmark from buttons on Firefox.

The nice thing is that throwing a bunch of tags onto something organizes your bookmarks for you. As you type, popular suggestions and bookmarks you’ve used are displayed to avoid tagging some things “rails” and others “rubyonrails”. Another nice benefit is that the popup to bookmark something also contains a description field, making it more convenient to describe the value of the bookmark instead of only naming like you do with traditional bookmarks (not that you can’t add descriptions to them, it’s just less convenient.)

I still use Firefox’s bookmarks toolbar for frequent sites that I use access like Gmail, Rails and Ruby API’s, etc. But, which of these are used usually varies computer-to-computer because they are situational (work, personal, etc), making the need for them to be portable less. Plus, the number of these are limited so you can always add them quickly.

In any case, another great tip is to use “Firefox Live Bookmarks”:http://johnbokma.com/firefox/rss-and-live-bookmarks.html to grab the feeds related to specific tags or delicious groups, and add them to your bookmarks toolbar. You could even make a “bookmarkstoolbar” tag that you subscribe to as a live bookmark, making the whole thing even more portable!

Some people can’t tolerate music during work, and I can vary. When I am in the music-with-work groove, then it’s great. But, let’s face it, getting work done is the goal and any time spent on looking for, organizing, remembering, etc music is a distraction.

Enter “RadioBlogClub”:http://radioblogclub.com/ , a website distributing a Flash application that streams music in its player. You can get complicated with it, and use similar services such as “Pandora”:http://www.pandora.com/ , but I prefer the speed and simplicity of RadioBlogClub (I call it radioblog among friends for brevity, and I will adopt that for the rest of this article =p ). What this entails is going to the website, searching for any song you like (many people host the player so a lot of songs are on there), and picking one. After the song ends, the “blog” will continue to the next song in the playlist, and the one after that, etc.

So…you get free songs that usually have a similar style that you’re looking for. You end up getting tons of new and old songs that come to you! No work required, you just keep developing and new songs appear before your very ears. So…you may be asking yourself, “Where does versioning come in?” Like I said before, I don’t like to waste time using the service’s features and building “bookmarks” of popular playlists. I don’t get interested in just one song from a particular blog either. Instead, with radioblog you get unique attachments to songs because they bring up several blogs, each with different styles of music…and you get attached to that as a whole.

“Yeah, yeah, so what’s the solution?” Well, as many of you probably know “37signals”:http://www.37signals.com/ has these neat little wiki-like editable pages called “Writeboards”:http://www.writeboard.com/ . They use a great markup language, “textile”:http://www.textism.com/tools/textile/ , that I also use in this blog (try it in the comments!) Like wiki history entries, writeboards have revisions. They also have this nice little ability that lets you compare two revisions (think the unix @diff@ command formatted nicely and with color), something that tailors to Writeboard’s collaborative writing audience. Finally, here comes the elegant solution: use writeboards to store a simple collection of songs that you currently enjoy. At any time, pull up your writeboard and radioblog the song and/or artist combo. If you find a new song/artist combo that pulls interesting results in radioblog, edit your writeboard to include it.

The key is to only keep the combos that you currently like in your writeboard. That way, the board isn’t cluttered…but even better, now try to compare two revisions. Alright! Versioned taste in music! At any time you can look at what you liked in the past, and start radioblogging those combos again. Talk about simple, fast, and productive…now get on to coding and Happy Halloween!

As my treat to you, here is a very simple example of the textile markup to keep your combos in. This can be made more pretty, but I like it because it keeps the textile markup I edit easy to read and manage too:

bq.
|*Song*|*Artist*|
|Perfume|Sparks|
|Zombie Remix|Cranberries|
|*|Richard Cheese|
|*|Daft Punk|

Which ends up looking something like this:

|*Song*|*Artist*|
|Perfume|Sparks|
|Zombie Remix|Cranberries|
|*|Richard Cheese|
|*|Daft Punk|

My goal with this blog will be to make exactly one post per day, always learning or reflecting on something new.