After toying a bit with Jots yesterday getting the bookmarklet tool to work, I am getting to like it more and more as a bookmark manager. I might be switching from ‘furling’ to ‘jotting’…
It more or less has everything you get with del.icio.us, meaning easy bookmarking, searching, tagging, rss feeds, seeing what others are marking, but being a newer kid on the social bookmarking block, it seems more responsive, cleaner interface, etc. Plus it has the ability to create groups of “privileged users” (need to think more about how that might be useful).
I will be toying with it the next few days, weeks to see if ti is worth sticking with, my jots site is http://jots.com/users/cogdog with RSS feed http://rss.jots.com/users/cogdog.
But the unique feature is the built in API to automatically post a days worth of bookmarked sites to your weblog via XML-RPC interface. The editing page for it just needs the URL for a blog’s xmlrpc file (which for WordPress fans is just http://……your_cool_blog_url…./xmlrpc.php). It uses “AJAX” technology to get the blog settings, and select a category which to post to. In theory, after midnight (their time, my time??) Jots will auto post my “jotted” sites to this site.
Thanks for the review CogDog! Thanks to Murphy, your review is coinciding with a rack move… we will be moving from the 9th floor to the 19th floor today and will have an hour or two of downtime 🙁
Hopefully the following will compensate for the downtime:
I’ve written toolbar for firefox that makes seamless jotting easier.
It’s alpha code, but it works for me…
install: http://vpop.net/~joe/jb.html
to use it (after restarting your browser):
You can click on the “j”, or alt-j will work on the PC.
highlite some text on the page if you want…
hit alt-j
hit tab (brings you to the “tags” field)
enter your tags
hit enter.
all done.
of course be sure that you are logged into jots or it won’t work and you
won’t be warned… your jot will just go into the ether.
I’ve been very frustrated with delicious and this is giving me the incentive to check out these alternative tools. Thank you!
Hi Alan,
You’ve done the WordPress thing, you’re getting up with the code, now all you need to do is install the subscribe to comments plugin and you will officially be up there is blog heaven: http://txfx.net/2005/03/28/wp-subscribe-to-comments-20-alpha-2/
Plus I’ll get to post here and not ask you to email me the answer… cos I’ll probably forget to come back…
Anyway enough of that, simple question: Do any of the other bookmarking tools have xlrpc built in for post to blog function… I ask because a. I’d like to compare Jots and something else and b. Jots doesn’t let me choose which blog I want to post to (you only get one shot)
Cheers, James
James-
We hear ya and the subscribe pluging was almost to easy to add. Scary.
I am noit sure I ahve seen the post to blog function in any other tool, it seemed unique to Jots. You could probably munge something using a RSS Feed and a server script that created a p[ost on a regular basis…
As far as I can tell it is not Jots problems in dealing with Multiple blogs but a WP issue, as I just tested with the XML-RPC for my MovableType server, and it gave me a list of blogs to choose from. This works the same in ecto, the desktop blog editing tool I use.
I can only guess it is the way your WP XML-RPC returns data- on a standalone site, it is one blog per URL.
Now that you have experimented with JOTS, on reflection, are you still as excited about it?
I may have tempered a bit of the excitement… I would say for a basic and individual bookmark management tool Jots works great and has pretty much the features of del.icou.us. They are new and likely adding features. Jots has an open API if you do that sort of thing.
If the social aspect of it is key where you use the sheer size of people participating in tag surfing, I’d say stay in del.ico.us. It has the most in terms of “geek” factor (barebone but workable interface)
Honestly I do not spend a whole lot of time poking around- my main priority is a searchable organizer that is quick to add things.
Alan,
You should give Netvouz (http://www.netvouz.com) a try as well.
It’s a bookmark manager where your bookmarks are primarily organized in categories but are also tagged with keywords. You can browse by category, tag or search among your own bookmarks and everyone else’s public. Also has private bookmarks support, a bookmarklet for adding new web sites, automatic link validation etc. etc. The user interface is clean and easy to navigate.
Still lacks an API but it’s in the plan…
And while you’re at it, perhaps you could add the Add2Netvouz bookmarklet to your Site Submission MultiTool.
Alan,
Jots seems like a cool tool, like you say nice and clean looking
not sure what to make of the groups either, no real explanation
but i like the date archive
anyway, do you know, if there is right-click tool, for jots, instead of using the bookmarklet.
Here is my post on other right-click tools:
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2005/05/09/right-click-tools-blogs-bookmarks/
I would know have an answer, John…. I do not really focus energy on tools that are browser specific.