While listening to one of my favorite podcasts this week I heard about an attention-grabbing and useful beta site.
First, the podcast is, "Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott". You can catch the weekly interesting, funny and informative conversations between the aforementioned Paul and Leo Laporte, at twit.tv. There are about a million other "Leocasts" there too. Yes, geeks like to listen to other geeks on occasion.
Next, "beta" is the word applied to an application, website, etc. that isn’t quite ready for everyone but may be shortly. Gmail was in beta for over five years. Fortunately most are not.
Now, let me talk about the site that grabbed my attention.
About ten years ago I decided that I needed a place to store a list of sites which interested me and that I often used. This kept me from having to memorize all of the site names or forgetting them over time. I created my own "personal" webpage. The list of 10-15 sites has now grown to a list of over 100. I know, I no longer read the majority of them with any regularity. I do to read them, but only occasionally. From any computer, all I have to do is log into that webpage and rapidly find any of those links.
Now I know some of you are saying, "Well, what about bookmarks in your browser?" Yes, I know that you can save all of these sites in your browsers’ bookmarks, but what happens when you don’t have your computer handy? You cannot remember the site you are looking for but at that point those bookmarks are unreachable!
The answer to the non-web designers out there
is 43marks.com. This site allows you to list all of those sites you want to keep track of whenever you are on the net…anywhere.
Of course, it is organized by category, just like my old page (why couldn’t I have invented this site?). It lists related sites within those categories. You can edit the categories they have pre-listed, delete them, re-order them and/or add, edit or delete any of the sites listed in them.
For those of you who also like to keep up with RSS feeds you have the option of listing those feeds on 43Marks. The feeds are well-organized at the bottom of the page with collapsible headers. If you use feeds you understand that last part; if not don’t worry about them.
You set up your 43Marks site with a username, email address and password. You then have the ability to hide it from the public or allow others to see your categories, links and RSS feeds. If you would like to visit mine go visit, http://43marks.com/doubleclicks.
If you try it, let me know what you think.