the blog

"You live and learn. At any rate, you live."

One of my favorite writers was Douglas Adams (who wrote "The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and some other very funny science fiction books). A month before he died in 2001, I had the good fortune to hear him speak at a technology conference in San Francisco.

"Life is wasted on the living," Adams had said, and on that day he proceeded to expand our minds with a breezy, sardonic discussion about what he expected from the future. Standing in front of a curtain dotted with reflecting stars, he announced matter-of-factly that "We are participating in a 3.5 billion-year program to turn dumb matter into smart matter." One of the many things he talked about was an enormous data model that could one day contain real-time information about every object in the universe — "a soft earth, alive and developing..."

I thought of that when I heard the news last month that Xerpi's users had already created nearly 7,000 tags just to describe their "Favorites" links. The whole point of tags is to create "meta information" pointing people to appropriate content that's already been discovered. It doesn't do any good to have a web page unless there's an easy way to find it for people who are interested. Ultimately it's the user-created tags that complete the relationship between a web page and its potential readers. They're very simple — but they're also extremely useful.

"We are fed up with 'technology'," Adams had told the audience, "when all we want is 'stuff that works'." He drove his point home by talking about one crucial difference between a cellphone and a chair. "A chair doesn't have a manual," he pointed out, but a cellphone does. ("The manual will tell you how to spend 17 hours programming your phone numbers into it with a match stick.") Adams always showed a great deal of faith in the instincts of humans — and a secret fascination with the progress of technology. "Unlike previous generations, we knew it was going to different," he told the audience. "We just didn't know what it would be..."

Last Tuesday was Douglas Adams' birthday. (He would've been 57.) Seven years down the road, I had to ask myself: what did we realize in this far-away future of 2008? And I realized that we humans are now doing it for ourselves. We're collecting up our own sets of "favorites," and then scattering out a trail of tags — like bread crumbs — so that others can also find their way to them. In some small way, we've already taken that first step into a grand, mysterious future.

"It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes," Adams once joked.

But at least some of them can be solved with tags.

   

Xerpi is simple -- but that doesn't meant you can't be clever! I'd just finished writing Ten Ways to Customize Xerpi when we found a couple more. Think of this as a "secret" second list of more Xerpi tricks...

The Xerpi memo pad.

Never forget anything again! You can leave a note for yourself in the title of any new link. The URL may be Xerpi.com, but its title could be "Don't forget to buy milk!"

Then the next time you're checking your Xerpi favorites -- there's that title, reminding you!

If you have a lot of notes, you might even need a whole link block to display them all! Fortunately, Xerpi's interface makes it easy to re-arrange the "to do" list -- so you can keep the most important ones on top.

Asci art

Why stop at just customizing a title? If something's really important, I've seen people type it IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS. But the more creative among us use....

          ~~~~ Asci Art! ~~~~

I like to remind myself that it's my own personal Xerpi page, with my bookmarks -- and if I'm making my own private bookmarks, I can personalize them any way I want!

For example, why just create a reminder link called "Don't forget to buy milk" when it's so much more melodramatic to write....

          ==> DO <== NOT ==> FORGET <== TO ==> BUY <== MILK

That may be over-doing it a bit, but it does make a valuable point. They're your links, on your home page -- which means they're also your titles.

The Secret tag

Remember, a link is "private" if you've checked the box marked private. So if you're typing in a tag for the link, then that tag is "for your eyes only." Why not use this as a chance to label your link with something original, creative -- or even silly.

If a tag points Xerpi users to useful information, then a private tag is a pointer from you -- to yourself! I once gave a bunch of my private links the tag "birthday-party-gift-ideas". Then I came back the next day and pulled them all up by searching for the "secret tag" on the Search Results tab...

I think it'd be fun to visit the search results page someday and pull up a bunch of private links that I've secretly marked with just-for-myself tags like "makesmelaugh" or "for-rainy-mondays"

Playing around with Xerpi is a great way to get familiar with its features -- and it's a nice reminder that Xerpi really is easy, slick and fun.

Here's a couple more tips culled from the staff at Xerpi...

Make a Public View

One of Xerpi's programmers left a nice trick on our "Geek blog". Why just share a few links with your friends? Why not share an entire Xerpi view!

"Simply create a new view and name it 'public'," writes Wray. (And be sure to type that name in all lower-case letters!) He'd discovered this technique in May, and Xerpi founder Con Way Ling pointed out that the trick also works if you just rename one of your existing views "public".

"Not only is this a nice way for me to share some of my favorite spots with all," Wray added, "but also it is a nice showcase for Xerpi functionality."

Sending Web Pages To Xerpi

I can't say enough about the "Post this to My Xerpi" buttons! When you're on a web page, they'll send it's URL straight into your Xerpi home page! Adding bookmarks to your homepage has never been easier. But if you're fussy about which link block gets the URL, there's another tip from Con Way Ling further down this page...

His friend Nguyen created a special Link Block -- called "To Be Filed" -- for collecting all the web page's he's sending back to his Xerpi home page!

It's just one more way that Xerpi's living up to its slogan... "We bring YOUR internet to you."