tjameswhite.com

I’ve recently started using a few online tools to meet my needs: Flickr for photos; del.icio.us for bookmarks; Listal and LibraryThing for books; and even Extratasty for my bar.

While I’m not thrilled with the presentation of Flickr — I find the navigation slightly confusion — I do like the functionality and flexibility of the system. I’ve also found a Wordpress plugin that will allow me to display Flickr photos on my site. I plan to do some upgrades around here, so look for photos on the site in the near future.

As for del.icio.us, I avoided it for a while because I just didn’t get it. Everything I read was focused on the community aspect — “share your bookmarks with others.” That just doesn’t interest me a whole lot. But, using the service to store bookmarks rocks. It’s great being able to bookmark a site either at home or work (or elsewhere) and being able to access it from where ever. I had been using Furl, but its way more cumbersome to use than del.icio.us (plus the Firefox extension hasn’t been updated).

As for books, I was wondering if there was tool like Flickr and del.icio.us for storing books and publishing a reading list on the blog. I found Listal and LibraryThing. Neither one of them is perfect, but LibraryThing is the better of the two. They seem to get tagging better, plus they allow for import/export and have a blog widget that might do what I want.

Extratasty is another of these Web 2.0-type applications — a social site that uses tags to categorize/organize data. While I like the interface and basic functionality, I’m not overly thrilled with the recipes. There are way too many silly and down-right stupid drinks (like at least three recipes for a shot of whiskey) in the list. Yes, the social rating should suppress them a bit, but I’d really like to eliminate them from my set all together. The site is still in its infancy, so I’m giving it time.