the blog

Did you know you could drag and drop an entire link block into a new view? A crosshair appears whenever your mouse is over the title of a block of favorites. Then just left-click on the block — and drag!

When you hold the block over the new view's tab at the top of your page, that tab's border changes from green to red. Then when you release the mouse, the block magically disappears from the current view — and re-appears on the new one!

This is a great way to tidy up your Xerpi home page. You don't always need all your link blocks at the same time. And sometimes having them all cluttered onto one page can even make it harder to spot the ones you need!

I've been trying to look at my favorites differently — thinking of special "sets" of link blocks — and then giving each set its own dedicated view. While I've got many useful blocks of links, sometimes I'll just want one group of those blocks, and other times it's a different group. (Plus, now that Xerpi lets me create public views, I've going to start creating new views with sets of public links.)

Of course you don't have to drag the blocks to a new view — you can also just move them to a different location on the page. (Maybe the first column could be "Morning" link blocks, and the third column could be "Evening" link blocks?) If you're new to Xerpi, you might want to check out this post — Top Ten Ways to Customize Xerpi.

As I was saying back in June — Xerpi can be whatever you want it to be. It's your favorites, and your view of your favorites.

Knock yourself out!

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."