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Your favorites have never been so awesome. Except in Opera. Maybe not even then.


neylitalo

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Introducing a browser-independent, accessible-anywhere tool that makes your internet experience easier, like the one so loved by so many Opera users: http://sticklinks.net

 

If you like it, tell your friends. And if you don't, tell me why. :)

 

Also, if you have suggestions for UI tweaks, those are welcome as well. I wrote it, so I know how it's supposed to work; if anything is unintuitive, you guys are the ones to know.

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Well, that's pretty impressive. As to intuition, even I can use it :)

 

That's good. :) I was really worried that I wouldn't make it as intuitive as it could be. And the bravado expressed in the title of this thread was far exaggerated - I've since received some very pleasant reviews, so I'm only now getting to be confident in its abilities as a tool for everybody. I am worried about one thing in particular, but I'm waiting to see if anybody complains about it before deciding that it's a problem.

 

Not fond of that opera feature (not that i use opera anyway) but seeing it as an web app makes me love it :D. Pretty awesome. The only thing i can suggest is adding some icons on the save/load/clear.

 

I thought of that, but I tried it out and I think I liked it better sans images. (It was designed from the start with the goal that it'd be clean and simple.) If more people are of the same opinion, though, I'll give it a shot. And I'm very glad to hear that you liked it.

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Cool :) I really like it.

 

A few suggestions:

[*] Capitalization. It looks more professional when all the links (Such as "about", "privacy", "save" etc') start with a capital letter.

[*] After loading a saved pad, I think it's better if the user/pass form will close and the links will come back up (Just like the save form disappears after saving).

[*] In the beginning, I didn't see the save/load/clear links. Only saw those on the left. Maybe putting boxes around the links would have helped me see them sooner (I saw them only because I looked for them). Although I am not sure boxes will do good with the forms. But I think the links should take more of the visitor's attention. The boxes in the middle are designed neatly and nicely imo, but the links are small and not visible. Some styling changes? I don't know.

[*] The most difficult problem to fix... In FF when I press save/load, the form overrides part of the boxes. In IE7 the boxes are moved to the left. I think the behavior in IE is ok (although it's not perfect, but nothing is :P), maybe you could tweak it a bit so FF will act the same?

 

But I must say I really like the idea, keep up the good work.

 

Orio.

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Overall I think it is a great idea and I like your implementation of it. The only thing that i have noticed so far is that there is no validation for the url. You may do server side validation to prevent sql injections but the url doesn't have to be valid. I just tried it with the url as "foobar" and saw "This page is cached for a snap shot, hang on for a few seconds".  Other than that I really like the idea. Good work

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It's cool I guess, but I personally wouldn't find it useful. Why would I keep my bookmarks anywhere but in my browser? :-\

 

But, I also have no home page. I dislike my browser loading anything without me asking for it. I'm a bit odd that way. I can see how regular people might find it useful. ;)

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A few suggestions:

[*] Capitalization. It looks more professional when all the links (Such as "about", "privacy", "save" etc') start with a capital letter.

 

I thought of that, and I tried it - but I think it detracted from the "clean, simple, and useful" feel I was going for. And I certainly appreciate the need for professionalism, but my vision of this program didn't involve investors, or advertisers, or anything. (I would be willing to put a small advertisement at the bottom. It would have to be plain text, though, and I'm not sure if any advertisers would let me do that.) It's just supposed to be a neat, useful tool.

 

[*] After loading a saved pad, I think it's better if the user/pass form will close and the links will come back up (Just like the save form disappears after saving).

 

It should do exactly that, what browser/OS are you using?

 

[*] In the beginning, I didn't see the save/load/clear links. Only saw those on the left. Maybe putting boxes around the links would have helped me see them sooner (I saw them only because I looked for them). Although I am not sure boxes will do good with the forms. But I think the links should take more of the visitor's attention. The boxes in the middle are designed neatly and nicely imo, but the links are small and not visible. Some styling changes? I don't know.

 

I hadn't thought of that. I'm not sure about the boxes, but I'll see if I can move the links.

 

[*] The most difficult problem to fix... In FF when I press save/load, the form overrides part of the boxes. In IE7 the boxes are moved to the left. I think the behavior in IE is ok (although it's not perfect, but nothing is :P), maybe you could tweak it a bit so FF will act the same?

 

I'll see what I can do. What resolution are you viewing it at?

 

But I must say I really like the idea, keep up the good work.

 

Orio.

 

Thanks. :) It's always nice to hear that.

 

And Tom, I'll see what I can do about that. Maybe a curl check might help.

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Completely? No. I have an idea of what's in there, and some of them I do know by heart, but for the majority I do not know the entire URL. Google is always a good fall back, but some topics are more ambiguous than others. And the list is bound to grow.

 

Neal, what happens if you fill up all 9 boxes?

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Neal, what happens if you fill up all 9 boxes?

 

Right now, absolutely nothing happens. I'm thinking of adding three more, as that's been a pretty popular request - but I have some serious qualms about making it expandable, and here's why.

 

I think Opera hit the nail on the head when they only let you put 9 in their speed dial. (I think 12 would be fine too.) In my head, this is a quick reference of the sites that you are most likely going to want to visit when you open a new tab/window, or start a new browsing "thread", or whatever. If you were to have 15 or 16 or 20 boxes there, I can't help but imagining feeling a little overwhelmed, and I think it might take longer for you to find the one you want. (I tried 16 in the Firefox speed dial extension, and I remember thinking that it was very crowded.)

 

And, most importantly (to me), I'm worried about link clutter. Even now, I'm trying to find ways to rearrange the six small links that I have, and maybe even remove one or two. If I were to let users expand their collections, I would probably have to use pagination, and then they'd need some way of navigating, and that probably means links. I might be able to use keyboard bindings, but I'm not sure how well that would work with unknown environments.

 

But I just realized that I'm starting to tell the users how my software should be used, when I should be making it so they can use it however they want. If anybody has any ideas for implementing pagination links, (cleanly - either no links at all, or placed in unobtrusive locations) I'd love to hear them. I don't want people to be saying "I'd use it if it weren't for the fact that..." I can deal with people using it in a way that I didn't design it for, but I can't deal with a complicated interface.

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Ah. I'm not familiar with Opera; I didn't know the feature was a "speed dial" type deal. I see your point.

 

Also:

 

- It appears that you're caching the images? Some are loading much quicker than others.

 

- Are the images updated every so often? Having never used a tool like this before, I must admit that I'm baffled by the images. Their size makes it difficult to retrieve anything useful without a click-through, and if they never update, that seems even worse, especially for sites that you might be able to discern some content from--a photo of the day website, for example. Of course, I'm a command line kind of guy anyhow. Perhaps the GUI folks love it :)

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Ah. I'm not familiar with Opera; I didn't know the feature was a "speed dial" type deal. I see your point.

 

I'm trying not to be stuck in the mindset of "Imitate Opera", because I want this to be useful even if you're not familiar with Opera. They have a very good idea, though, so I want to take "advice" from them if I can.

 

Also:

 

- It appears that you're caching the images? Some are loading much quicker than others.

 

- Are the images updated every so often? Having never used a tool like this before, I must admit that I'm baffled by the images. Their size makes it difficult to retrieve anything useful without a click-through, and if they never update, that seems even worse, especially for sites that you might be able to discern some content from--a photo of the day website, for example. Of course, I'm a command line kind of guy anyhow. Perhaps the GUI folks love it :)

 

The images are cached with an expiration time set to 12 hours. The service I'm using to get the thumbnails (thumbalizr.com) is relatively slow to generate new thumbnails (about 30 seconds per thumbnail), and I'm afraid that's just too long to not cache them.

 

And you're right - the images are very difficult to get any real content out of; I guess I hadn't considered that case. I interpreted Opera's implementation (and designed mine accordingly) to mean that the images are just a visual identifier - you have to do considerably less work to pick out the familar Google logo or the PHP.net design, than to read the label.

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[*] After loading a saved pad, I think it's better if the user/pass form will close and the links will come back up (Just like the save form disappears after saving).

 

It should do exactly that, what browser/OS are you using?

 

FF, XP Pro. It seems you've made changes any way. Can't find the save lol. Guess it's under development or something.

 

 

[*] The most difficult problem to fix... In FF when I press save/load, the form overrides part of the boxes. In IE7 the boxes are moved to the left. I think the behavior in IE is ok (although it's not perfect, but nothing is :P), maybe you could tweak it a bit so FF will act the same?

 

I'll see what I can do. What resolution are you viewing it at?

 

1152 x 864

 

 

Orio.

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It seems you've made changes any way. Can't find the save lol. Guess it's under development or something.

 

It's still there. :) I moved save/load/close to the left-hand side, and tips/privacy/feedback to the right.

 

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Orio, I think you'll be pleased with the latest revision. I've moved the link sections to the edges of the link pad, and have provided enough room for the forms to show up without pushing anything out of the way.

 

It also made more sense to put the important links on the left. (Thanks for inspiring it.) This way, no matter what your resolution is, the upper left corner will always have all the links you need to make it operate.

 

I've also fixed some IE display bugs. It turns out that just using a Reset CSS file doesn't fix nearly as many IE/Firefox inconsistencies as I'd dreamed.

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Orio: I've been having some odd problems with cookies - I've found that when that happens, you usually have two PHPSESSID cookies set. If you delete them, you should be all set. I think it had something to do with me setting the session.cookie_lifetime to one week, but I've un-done that.

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Yep, that's the cookie problem rearing its ugly head again. I thought I fixed that - apparently not. I'll post back here when I get it sorted out.

 

I suppose this isn't good for the overall reputation - I was hoping that it'd be stable by the time I "launched" it.

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