In development: Zoowalu cache

One nice feature coming up soon: caching of bookmarked web pages. This feature becomes useful when the link to the bookmarked page becomes dead and you still want to see the contents of the bookmarked page.  Bookmark page contents are going to be cached at the time it is first added to Zoowalu. Probably every user will have it’s own cache storage, so that everyone can see the version of the page at the time he/she bookmarked it.

New features: Calendar, importing from del.icio.us

I have just added the Calendar feature and Import from del.icio.us feature. Users can now access them from their Zoowalu user page. So far there’s only one calendar view available, but more coming soon with more functionality. Importing from del.icio.us is also fully-functional now and all you have to do is enter your del.icio.us user name and password. It uses del.icio.us API to access user’s bookmarks. Bookmark titles and tags are imported, not the dates.

Sometime later I plan to implement more calendar features such as searching current month from the calendar month view.

Development slowdown

Last couple of weeks were busy for me. I was spending much time on college and some photography work. So it was hard to find some time for Zoowalu. The calendar is almost done and the importing bookmarks from del.icio.us is done and needs to be added to the user interface. I’ll try to post all changes to the web site so users can access the new feature. I hope I’ll finish the calendar some time this week and post the first beta to the web site as well.

Importing bookmarks from Del.icio.us coming soon!

Why would anyone move from del.icio.us to Zoowalu? Well, there is at least one reason to do it now – you will be able to import your bookmarks from del.icio.us to Zoowalu. That means you can keep all your records and keep saving new bookmarks directly to Zoowalu. The process is going to be easy and fast. All you need to do is input you del.icio.us user name and password and you’re done. Easy as that!

I’m also planning to implement importing from such services as Simply and Shadows. Probably even more are coming. I think this will be one more reason for users to switch from those services to Zoowalu .

New features: The most discussed bookmarks

Highlights of the last week:

• The most discussed bookmarks. Now on Zoowalu homepage you can see the list of most discussed bookmarks. This list represents bookmarks that received most comments during the past 7 days. This enables users to checkout the latest comments and what people talk about most.
• Calendar in progress. Calendar of user’s bookmarks is not ready yet, but the development is progress and we should expect it in few weeks. Calendar will be available in several modes: compact and full.

What is going to be done this week:

• Keep working on Calendar.
• Extend Zoowalu API functions.

More ideas

Last night I had a couple of ideas about Zoowalu features. One I came up with was the idea to add “This might be interesting to you” block where Zoowalu will suggest the interesting links for the currently signed in user. It is something that Amazon does when you look at certain products: next time you come to Amazon it suggests you some other interesting titles of the same topic.

How is this going to help? Is this really needed? I would say yes. Social bookmarking is not only posting your bookmarks, but also discovering some new! What if you accidentally discover a bookmark without any intentions to do it? What if an interesting bookmark title pops up at the top of the screen and makes your day? I hope this feature is helpful and I plan to implement it sometime this month. Have fun posting!

New features: bookmark sending, search by date

Highlights of the last week:

• Bookmark sending. Send a bookmark to your friend. It is easy and fast. Just click “send” next to the link in your list or go to the bookmark page (by clicking the “Z” next to any bookmark) and click “Send bookmark”. All you have to enter is the existing Zoowalu user name and a message. Bookmark URL, title and tags get filled in automatically.
• Seach by date. Now you can search your bookmarks by date. To do that you have to add “date:[date range]” to your query. For example: “programming date:9/1/2006-10/1/2006″. This will look up all the bookmarks tagged with ‘programming’ between September 1, 2006 and October 1, 2006 including. You can also combine it with ‘user:’ search rule to search only specific user’s bookmarks.

What is going to be done this week:

• User’s calendar. Users will be able to see the calendar of bookmark posting and see what days were active and which were not.

I must say I could barely find a couple of free hours to work on Zoowalu and add some cool features. Besides busy college days I had a wedding I had to shoot (that’s my little business for now) on Saturday. Now I have to work on those raw shots to make them look nice before I can give them to my client. That will take away a week or two of my time. Then the amount of homework I’m getting in college is growing every day. Less and less time is left for me every day.

But back to Zoowalu. I have just finished implementing and debugging the profile editing feature. It was rather easy to add that feature because it’s just loading/saving date from/to database. I used the registration template and backend to make profile editing work. You can now change the password, use your My5 feature, change the amount of bookmarks shown on your Zoowalu pages etc. I hope those are useful features to you.

What’s next? The big plan is to add the bookmark posting feature so that users can send interesting links to each other. I have an idea to add the buddy’s list and sending to email (in case your friend is not on Zoowalu (shame on him )). I hope this is going to be partly done by the end of this week.

New features: profile editing, My5

Highlights of the last week:

• Profile editing. You can now edit your profile, change your password and set some of your personal settings. Zoowalu is more yours now .
• My5. A new feature that allows you to chose 5 of your favorite tags that are shown in big font above your bookmarks on your Zoowalu page. This helps you easily access the topics that are most interesting to you.

What is going to be done this week:

• Bookmark posting. Users will be able to send bookmarks to each other which expands your sharing features on Zoowalu. This is useful when you find a link that might be interesting to your Zoowalu friend and all you need to do is just enter the Zoowalu friend’s name and click “Send”!

Probable development slow down

Today was the first day of my college. Seems like it is going to take more time than I ever expected. This means that I will have less time to devote to Zoowalu, and I must admit that development and implementation of the new features may slow down. I will try to do my best to find an hour a day to work on Zoowalu and add something exciting to it or fix another bug. Plans for this week so far are to implement the profile editing so you can have your own personal settings, change your password or your email address.