In August last year – almost at the beginning of this blog I made a post about creating a “Cool Tools” page that will house links to all my favourite tools that I come across and use.
The original blog post suggested that I would be using a Wiki to manage the set of links. Even though I did develop that component in the end (which I may still find use for), my gut feeling said there was something smelly with managing these links in a wiki since I also use Delicious to store links conveniently with the Firefox Delicious Bookmarks extension – and having to then copy items across into a wiki seemed like too much of a pain and a bit of a double up (I’ve learnt that if something isn’t seamlessly easy, human nature is to put it off so much that you end up not doing it at all).
However, at the same time I wanted to display the list of tools I bookmark in delicious on my website in a nice categorised, hierarchical view… so I got my thinking cap on of how I could have the best of both worlds. After googling around I found that there wasn’t much code out there that converts a set of delicious links with tags into a categorised hierarchy view of them all – so after some sketching I came up with a way to do it (i.e and algorithm to convert tags » hierarchy).
Long story short, my list of tools is finally up and fairly stable (I haven’t been adding huge amounts to the list for the past little while).
You can find it at:
I am also using the same tool (by filtering on a different set of delicious tags) to provide a list of my Favourite Blogs and Favourite Articles.
Each set has their own feed that you can subscribe to if you are interested, or they have a “View by Date Added” button you can use to see what was added since your last visit.
All in all, doing this is part of my “manage information overload” flow (without just shutting it off completely) that I have been trying to fine tune over the last little while which I may blog about at some point – as well as a way to share with the world things I find that I think are good enough to share!