Online bookmarking

I've never been taken by the whole online bookmarking thing (sites like del.icio.us), or indeed online RSS readers for consolidating your regular blog reads into a single location, but it's funny what a nice interface can do to change that. This post is actually about the bookmarking part, but as a quick aside I've started using Google Reader and I think I may stop again. The interface, while simple and nice enough, doesn't quite do it for me and frankly when it comes down to it, I'd rather read the posts in their natural location on the websites they came from. Which vaguely leads onto the core of this post in that I then bookmark blogs I like... Anyway, in a round-about way I found the blog of a French developer who, like me and many others, is just getting into Ruby on Rails. The first cool thing he's done (though not quite a Rails-specific thing) is a cool AJAX 'pop-up' window class. It basically creates a floating div for AJAX content that gets styled like a window, but the cool bit is the resizing just like an actual window. As has been pointed out though, this has the potential for horrible use in advertising. Moving on from that, he's made himself (and made available to us) an online bookmarking app in Rails called my.xilinus. There's a nice Flash video demo of how it works and it does seem to work well. The interface is appealing while not being too complicated and with a little more work could be highly nifty. I'm not sure I'll use it in the medium-long run, just because it's an extra place I have to keep a copy of the data, but it'd be extremely handy when travelling where you're using 'net cafes to get online. Eventually, browsers will be able to connect straight into services like this though, at which point it'll be great. Get on any computer anywhere, enter a username/password (as much as people like to hate Microsoft, something like the .NET Passport would be handy for this) and get all your bookmarks from a hosted location elsewhere. This way your bookmarks can truly follow you. Until that happens though (maybe it has - I did say I haven't been following this area), check out my.xilinus if for nothing else than a nice demo of AJAX working well.