Ask Bluey - Beyond Bookmarks User Guide
This is a mildly irreverent user guide for the various features within Ask Bluey - Beyond Bookmarks (ABBB)
You can't search what you don't have. The first step is to grab hold of your existing bookmarks, from wherever you saved them.
You can import your bookmarks from your browser (Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer). You can also import them from your delicious.com account if you have added your account details via the Online Accounts tab.
You can also save your imported bookmark list as an html file. You can use this file to import your ABBB bookmark list into a browser on your current or another computer. You can also use the file to backup your bookmarks, or even to post them to your website. If you care to annoy your friends, you can print out this file and include it with your christmas cards.
Saving bookmarks is all very well, finding and using them in a worthwhile transaction is better. In fact, as we like to say at the AskBlueyPlex, bookmarks do not seem to age quite as well as wine.
Happily, Ask Bluey lets you search for any text on any of your bookmarked pages. This is useful when you have a vague memory of a page that you bookmarked, but find that you may have mislaid the pertinent details such as what you called it when you saved it. (And why should we be expected to develop systematic hierachies for placing webpages? This is a task surely much better left to The Machine).
If the search box turns green as you are typing then that means that all the words you have typed can be found in your list of bookmarks. If the search box is red, then at least one of the words cannot be found.
The search box might be red while the list still contains bookmarks. This means that at least one word can be found, while at least one other word does not match.
Once you have selected a bookmark from the list, the current search terms will automatically be highlighted on the page. On the left hand side of the page, the Highlight Bar will show you exactly where on the page the search terms lie.
The Highlight Bar shows the currently visible portion of the page with the blue box. Search term matches on the page are shown in smaller boxes and in different colours. To view each match, you can drag the blue box to each match, just like how you drag the right hand side scrollbar to scroll the page.
In fact you can treat the Highlight Bar as just another scrollbar, albeit one that shows you where to scroll to.
You can also hold down Ctrl or Shift and click directly on a search term match. This will scroll the match into view on the page.
If you're a keen tagger, then the patterns that your tags and bookmarks form are likely fairly interesting and indeed meaningful. From your bookmark you can see the tags, and now from
the Tag Cluster page you can see your tags and the bookmarks associated with each.
If you're not interested in tagging, that's okay too. The Bookmark Cluster page shows you your bookmarks grouped by semantic similarity.
How do you measure the semantic similarity between two bookmarks? Simply by comparing the geometric angle between two bookmarks after mapping their text into a hyperspace of course.
(You can also use this semantic similarity measure to rank your each bookmark in your collection by relatedness to a given bookmark).
Rather than displaying bookmarks in a fixed hierarchy of folders, ABBB simply shows all bookmarks in one list and lets you assign multiple tags to a bookmark which you can then filter with.
For example, imagine a page about the weather in Sydney. It contains information about rainfall averages and the current weather forecast. In a traditional bookmark system, you might have created folders called “Sydney” in which you place bookmarks related to Sydney. Perhaps you also created a folder called “weather” that contains weather forecasts for cities that you visit. When you add the "sydney weather" page to your bookmarks, you then have to decide which folder to add it to – “Sydney” or “weather”. (Is this the kind of decision that should occupy our minds in this enlightened age?)
Tags solve this classification problem by letting you assign both “sydney” and “weather” to this bookmark. This way, your new bookmark will appear in both folders. (If we boldly designate that a tagspace entails a logical folder).
To add tags to a bookmark, just select a bookmark and type the tags into the Tags box. Separate each tag with a space. Note that tags cannot themselves contain spaces. To add multi-word tags you might like to use underscores or hyphens. For example “los_angeles” or “los-angeles” or even “losangeles”, not “los angeles” (which will add two tags “los” and “angeles”).
To reuse a tag that you have already added to another bookmark, click the button with the blue arrow to the right of the Tags box. This will show a popup with your current set of tags. You can add and remove tags to the current bookmark just by clicking on the words in the popup.
To filter the list of your bookmarks based on a tag, click the grey index book on the left above the list of bookmarks. This will show a popup with the tags that you have added to your bookmark. Click a tag to filter the list to those bookmarks with the specified tag. Unselect a highlighted tag by clicking it.
After you have imported your bookmarks into ABBB, you can edit the title, the description and the tags associated with the bookmark. Your changes are automatically applied and saved when you quit ABBB.
When you have selected a bookmark, ABBB will display the version of the page as it existed when you imported it. Of course, web pages change over time for better and worse. The content that you were originally interested in may be updated or may be removed entirely. For this reason, ABBB does not automatically replace the saved version of the bookmark. Instead, you have the option of refreshing a bookmark by clicking the circular refresh button. This will check if the page has been updated and show you those changes. If you are happy with the changes, click the save button to store the new version of the page.
To import bookmarks that you have recently added to your web browser, go to the Import tab and press Import Bookmarks. This will add any bookmarks that you have added since the last time you imported your bookmarks into ABBB. It will also re-index your entire bookmark collection.
Integration is provided for the following browsers:
Chrome
Firefox
Internet Explorer
Your complete list of imported bookmarks pops up in any browser to allow you to instantly search and navigate to your favourite bookmarks.