Typo Pad

My Bookmarks are Dead, Long Live the New CiteSeerX

Here's a copy of a message I sent via the CiteSeerX feedback form just now:

This new CiteSeerX is nice and all, but I have hundreds of bookmarks to the old CiteSeer which are now broken.  I sincerely hope this is a temporary condition, but even if it is, the deadline for my thesis is in two weeks.  Is there any way I can reconnect those old bookmarks to CiteSeerX pages?

I don't think "hundreds" is an over-estimate, but it's hard to know, because of course, these are not all traditional bookmarks in a single browser's configuration.  I have about a dozen instances of Firefox in various states of tabbed browsing hell, and many of those have some tabs open to CiteSeer pages I need to be able to find again.  I also have more than my fair share of social bookmarks, Linkwad depots and what not. (All of this is part of my struggle to organize some sort of scalable and pseudo-organized memory of sites I want to be able to find again.  ma.gnola and Linkwad are my current bets, but they're probably not the Final Ultimate Solution.) And of course, I have copy+pasted CiteSeer links to various places over the years.

Color me cynical, but wouldn't it be typical if they were to respond something along the lines of "sir," (or "madam;" happens all the time that silly Americans wage a 50/50 bet on what gender a foreign first name sounds like) "we have never supported the use of bookmarks on our site."

(And just to add insult to injury, "Besides, don't you think this new flashy <blink>Ajax</blink> thingy has a lot more, what's the word, usamability?"  But I digress.)

Having said that, the CiteSeer folks have been running a very useful service over the last 10 years, and always been very helpful and forthcoming when I had a comment or a problem. I just really really wish they have a plan for how to allow external bookmarks to continue to work even though they migrate to a new infrastructure.

(Oh, and sorry for not blogging. The reasons should be somewhat obvious. I have my commitments clear, and am communicating to stakeholders via email. Commitments do not include blogging. See you in April.)

Wishlist: Better integration with social bookmarks

My initial impression with Typepad has so far been mostly favorable, but one of my wishlist items would be better integration with social bookmarking sites.

My original "not a blog" started when I was a de.lirio.us user (the link is to Simpy because they inherited the de.lirio.us userbase), then never really recovered as I tried, and found disappointments with, various social bookmarking sites.  I basically like ma.gnolia but, well, it just doesn't quite cut it for posting anything more than quick notes on a single bookmark.  (The ability to have limited HTML in the comments would already take it far, but I doubt they're even considering it.  Some other remarks on social bookmarking sites are on my moribund del.icio.us account.)

Anyway, I am thus sort of approaching blogging from the "opposite direction".  I have grown accustomed to tagging things, and have sort of my own little folksonomic taxonomy fairly well worked out (ahem, quirks and all) -- and I would like to use the same no-frills, easy-going tags for my blog posts on Typepad, too.  However, it doesn't really want to work that way.  The normal mode for a posting is to have a single tag; adding multiple tags is possible, but you can't add multiple tags and coin new tags at the same time.  If you create a new tag, all the tags you had already selected are blanked, and you have to start over.

In my dream world, it would be possible to mash up the ma.gnolia tags into the Typepad posting interface, but ... well, I can always dream up new interesting features.  (In fact, that's kind of what I do.)