The cross-user search of public
bookmarks was released several weeks ago. It features a number of
search and sort options. You can search using any keyword, or you can
search by tag. You can also search by site (domain or host name), and
even file type or extension. You can sort results by popularity, or
by freshness, and of course by relevance. The search results page
also features the list or tag cloud of related tags, as well as the
list of users most relevant to your search.
Each user now has a Profile page. The Profile page
is not visible yet, but you can get to your Profile page by going to
http://www.simpy.com/user/YourUsernameHere.
By popular demand, tag auto-completion was added to
pages for adding and editing links. Use the tab key or mouse-click to
auto-complete the selected tag, and up/down arrows to loop through
tags. If you enter just a space right at the beginning of the tag
field, all your tags will be displayed and offered.
The Firefox toolbar extension was created by a Simpy fan and
user, Alexandru Badiu. More about it soon.
The same person who created the Simpy Firefox
extension also created an Ajaxy Drupal module for Simpy. The module
lets you include a cool tag cloud into your blog and have Ajax-driven
search results right in your blog. Here is a demo, and here is the module itself.
Simpy's REST API was
expended with the tag management API calls for tag renaming, tag
removing, tag merging, and tag splitting.
Simpy's Topics were finally renamed to Watchlists.
The new name matches the functionality more closely than the old name.
Several months ago support for Google
AdSense was added. This allows Simpy users to earn a bit of money
from Simpy. More information is available here,
here,
and here.
If you use FeedBurner for your blog's feeds, you
will be interested in a Simpy
FeedFlare, which lets subscribers to your blog save your posts
into Simpy.
This release also saw a fair number of smaller bug fixes
People Search feature is here! Use it to find your friends
in Simpy (or to invite them, if you find they haven't
discovered Simpy yet). You can look for people by their
name or username, or by entering one or more tags that
they've used.
Groups! Collaborative Bookmarking and Tagging, woohooo! Use Groups if you
have friends or colleagues or family or classmates or
... and want to share links with them. You can share
them via a Group, which can be handy for any type of
collaboration that needs to bookmark and/or tag links.
Once you create a group, you can invite others to join
it. You can invite both people who are existing Simpy
members (just use their Simpy usernames), as well as
people who are not in Simpy yet (just use their email
addresses).
You can now get a feed (RSS or Atom) for a search!
Additional feed improvements - simplified feeds - no
more old RSS and Atom feed formats - RSS 2.0 and Atom
1.0 (both the latest versions of both formats) are
supported. Feed URLs have changed, and will likely
change again shortly.
Tag Cloud and Tag
Management user interfaces are now two separate
screens, making Tag Management page smaller, faster, and
easier to work with. There is also an alphabetized list
of tags on the right side of the screen, along with
counts for each tag, making it easy to spot tags that
need taming.
Bookmark upload
tool has been improved, and now allows you to specify
whether you want to import your bookmarks as public
(recommended) or private. In addition, you can enter a
tag to assign to all uploaded bookmarks, which
afterwards lets you easily find all bookmarks that got
uploaded. Of course, you may want to remove that tag
after the upload, and you can do that via Tag Management.
Argus is back!
What does this mean for you? It means you can search full-text
of all your saved pages, and your search results pages
will show dynamic contextual summaries for each search hit,
plus you'll see your search terms highlighted in those
summaries. Need to see it in action? Here is a search against
all my public links for gizmo.
You can now search full-text of other users' saved pages,
as well as their tags. Just look at the search form at the top
of the pages when you are on any other Simpy user's page. For
example, look at my page
and note the new "otis's Links" option in the search
form pull-down menu. You can search all the usual link search fields.
Your Tag Cloud has arrived! Check out the "tags" link in
the nav bar at the top of the page. Hover above each tag in a
Tag Cloud, and you'll see data about each tag's occurrence
counts and Tag Cloud Relevance Factor™.
Four new functions will bring order to your Tag chaos.
Simpy's new Tag Management Tool
lets you rename a tag, merge 2 tags into a new
tag, split a tag into 2 new tags, and remove a
tag you no longer want.
The front page now sports a list of Most
Active Users, to help you discover new and interesting links
that others are saving.
Some users include numbers in their tags, and they've asked
for numeric tag support. Tags consisting of numbers used to be
discarded, making it impossible to search numeric tags. No
longer. Tag something with "1917, October Revolution",
and you'll be able to find it when searching for 1917.
This applies to both Link and Notes tags.
Some people reported a problem with Simpy This! bookmarklet under
Internet Explorer. It turned out Internet Explorer has a
bookmarklet length limit (bug?) that we hit. The new version of Simpy This!
bookmarklet is shorter, and should work under all mainstream
browsers (please report problems, if you encounter any).
Several bug fixes, including a fix for Account Info saving. This means you
can now enter your Blog URL. If you enter your ZIP/postal code
or country or some other bit of information, I'll try to make
use of it in some "geo-useful" way (ideas, suggestions,
requests are welcome).
Finally, pleeeeaaase enter your Security Question. This is for
your own benefit. What's the Security Question all about? It
will let you gain access to your Simpy account even if you
forget your password and even if sending you your password via
email no longer works for you (e.g. you've changed your email
providers). If you forget your password, providing the correct
answer to your Security Question will let you back into your
account.
Simpy got a bit smarter about tags and now offers "Related
Tags" whenever you make a search, or click on a tag. Knowledge
Discovery was one of Simpy's initial and core goals, and
Related Tags make that very easy now. You will find Related
Tags on the right side of all relevant pages.
Similarly to Related Tags, you will now see a list of
Related Users, whenever you look at a Simpy user, and there are
other users with similar interests. This lets you explore the
Simpy user space and find people to add to and watch via your
Topics. You will find Related Users on the right side of all
relevant pages.
David Czarnecki
wrote Simpy-java, the first binding for Simpy's REST
API. Simpy-java is a part of the SimpyAPI
project. If you're a Python, Perl, Ruby, Java, C#, C/C++,
or PHP hacker, I'm looking for a few good hackers interesting
in writing open-source code for SimpyAPI
project.
Simpy's REST API was
updated with methods for getting and saving Notes,
making it possible to integrate Simpy Notes into desktop and
external web applications.
Back in May Simpy moved to a set of new, more powerful
servers, and a better hosting facility. Mmmmmm... speedorama.
Simpy got a blog. It will
be used for brief announcements, sharing of tips, tricks, etc.
If you develop applications that work with Simpy, or come up
with cool hacks that make use of Simpy services, that can go to
the blog, too. Simpy's user mailing
list and developer
mailing list will remain active, for those who prefer
mailing lists to blogs.
Invite a <insert somebody
here> feature has been added. Use it to invite
your friends, family, colleagues, or anyone else who might like
Simpy. There is currently no limit to the number of
invitations you can send, so go crazy. If you want to see what
an invitation looks like, send one to yourself.
Every link in Simpy can now be emailed. It's a simple
little thing, but it's handy when you want to send a link to
someone and don't want to bother switch to your mail
application or a webmail account.
As usual, I'm interested in your feedback and suggestions.
The Contact page has
been improved, so you can easily send us an email without
launching your mail application.
In addition to saving web pages, you can now use Simpy to
save private free-text Notes.
You can tag each Note with multiple tags. When you
save or edit a Note its title, tags, and its whole body
are all indexed and made searchable.
Read more...
The new Simpy Services,
include the REST
API, as well as several types of Feeds in 4 different
formats. The REST API lets you integrate Simpy with other
applications and services, or pull Simpy data into your own
applications. Use it, but please try not to abuse it.
If you have crazy and cool ideas, but need a richer API, email.
Simpy's user interface (UI) went through the major overhaul. I tried making
the UI lighter, easier and more intuitive to navigate. Your
feedback would be greatly appreciated.
The old quota set to 1000 links has been removed. Long
live cheap disk space!
The Circle feature has been fully discontinued and has been
replaced by far superior Watchlists.
Several users have asked about hooking up their
Simpy accounts with their Delicious accounts.
This is now possible with Third PartyIntegration available from the
Tools
page. Future releases will include support for other
third party services, but feel free to send
suggestions of your favorite services you'd like to see
supported.
Bookmark Circle has been upgraded with new
features, and renamed to Topics.
Link History feature was added in the previous
release, but this release adds a handy
Link
History Bookmarklet that lets you look up
Simpy Link History for any web page you find
on the web.
One of Simpy's hidden gems is its Browser
Sidebar, which has been greatly
enhanced in this release.
You can now use Bulk Edit (available from the
Search Results page) to change access properties
(private vs. public) of several links at once,
instead of changing one at a time.
Full-text searching was suspended for a while,
but is back in this release.
Link History is a new Simpy feature. It shows
you the Simpy history for a given link.
Besides the raw numbers and dates, Link History
also includes a pretty chart, visually
displaying the life of a link in the Simpy
community.
For example, see the Simpy history of http://www.mozilla.org/.
You can now search other users' links, just like
you can search your own links or your Circle's
links. The search box is in the top-right corner
of every Simpy page. For example, look at the
links for user otis
and use the search box on the top-right to search
just that user's links.
Multi-word tags support was added. For
example, entering "New York, San Francisco, Paris"
will result in 3 tags: 1) New York, 2) San
Francisco, and 3) Paris. Until now, this would
have resulted in 5 tags: 1) New, 2) York,
3) San, 4) Francisco, 5) Paris.
This enhancements lets you enter multi-word tags
without forcing you to resort to tricks like
"New_York" or "New-York" or "NewYork".
Search results page now includes 'search links'
to Google, AlltheWeb, and other web-side search
engines. These links include your Simpy query,
this allowing you to search those search engines
without re-typing your query. For example,
search for blog
and note the 'search links' on the right-hand side.
Carlo Zottmann has written McSearchPreview, a Firefox extension
that adds thumbnail previews to Simpy search
results and other pages. You can get
McSearchPreview here.
This release brings full-text searching, private bookmarks, and more.
Starting with this release, a powerful web
crawler will monitor and index your bookmarks
regularly, letting you full-text search your
bookmarks.
This also introduces a new search field called
page, that you can use to search only the
content of a bookmarked web page.
You can now add a short free-text note to each
bookmark. This note is shown everywhere along your
bookmarks, including the front page and search
result.
The improved search results now include a summary
that is dynamically generated, depending on the
query, and includes highlighted search terms.
The note field is indexed as well, so
you can use it when searching your bookmarks or your
Circle, too.
Each bookmark can explicitly be made public or
private now. In addition, you can pick the default
access setting in your preferences.
It is now possible to subscribe to other users' bookmark
feeds. You are not limited to
members of your Bookmark Circle - you can subscribe
to any Simpy user's feed.
simpy
