Dopp Juice Archive

Here’s a fun site: Peanut Butter Wiki (or “pbwiki” for short). It’s a site of free wikis. Anyone can create one. You’ve probably heard of wikis, but they’re kind of a tough concept to wrap your brain around. Here’s the idea: Wikis are websites that allow anyone (or a select group) to edit the content. And they mean it. If you have access to editing a wiki, you can delete the whole page. Or add all sorts of profanity. Or work on an honor system and collaborate effectively. The idea is that you’ll do the latter. What trust! What great faith in mankind on the web! And it’s all in plain text! You don’t even use HTML!Well, there are some safety nets. Wikis keep tabs on old versions of files, so a previous one can be restored. Certain big wikis like Wikipedia keep an eye out for “nonsense and vandalism” and ban those authors immediately. But do you realize that anyone (yes, even you) can edit that internationally widespread encyclopedia? If you know something about “stuff,” why don’t you put it up there? But back to Peanut Butter Wiki… It’s a useful free tool for getting some info on the web quickly. And it’s even more useful if you want other people to contribute to it. Check out my wiki for a demo. I’ll even give you the password once you get there, so you can edit it. Then you can build your own and wiki-wiki to your heart’s content.

After all my grunting about expensive planners that are either too big or too small and never customized to me, I just found a (hopefully) great solution — a hack for turning a regular notebook into an idea organizer. The instructions for building it are here: PigPodPDAI like it because my brain works in spurts of ideas, rather than in blocks of appointments. Capturing and processing those ideas are a challenge for me; they often get lost in the dated pages of agendas. This system is based on idea spurts. In the first 24 hours, I put five pages of ideas down on paper — ideas that have been bouncing around in my head for weeks without a place to live. They thanked me.As for cost, the author writes about turning Moleskine notebooks into this fabulous mechanism — but I have a hard time spending $15 – $20 on 100 pages that I’m likely to fill up in a month or two. So I bought a $2 spiral-bound that included a moveable plastic tab (like the “Today” bookmarks in “real planners”). I think it will be just right.So far it works great. My creative mind feels more honored than it has in a long time, and my obsessive planning side has a checklist always nearby.

I have a confession to make. I’ve been sucked into del.icio.us. Besides having a very clever domain name, it’s downright addictive. Start browsing, and there’s a constant flow of good websites and information, all peer-reviewed for popularity. What is del.icio.us? How does it work?They call themselves “social bookmarking.” Basically, you open a free account with them, use it to keep a list of public bookmarks, organize them by “tags” (keywords that describe the websites), and browse the del.icio.us community for more bookmarks to visit. What makes del.icio.us cool (and addictive)?The homepage lists the most recently added bookmarks. It also lists the most popular tags. Browse the tags for a category you’re interested in today, and you’ll immediately find something the greater web community proudly approves of. Want to keep browsing? Every bookmark entry lists how many other people also link to that website. Click on that number, and you get a list of those people. Continue navigating, and you find the other bookmarks of those like-minded people. It’s a web of website sharing. Check it out by viewing my current bookmarks and clicking around.How do they make their domain name like that? Here’s my theory: they thought ahead. It’s possible to buy domain names that end in *.us, because it stands for United States (there’s also *.uk, *.au, and so on available). They bought icio.us for their domain name. Then they added a subdomain (which comes before the domain name in the URL) and named it “del”. Thus: del.icio.us. I suspect more people will start doing this, now that all the good domains have been taken. Pretty neat, huh? Remember to set aside several hours to browse once you get started.Update: If browsing is more important than listing your own bookmarks, check this out: Spiderous. They display the most popular and most recently bookmarked links on del.icio.us, as well as on three other social bookmarking arenas.