Two weeks ago, Claude emailed me and asked

Could you possibly give me (maybe in a future post) an evaluation of Onfolio. I have downloaded the free offer several months ago but never installed it. I would like to know indication, contraindication, bugs if any and what you can and can’t do with this program.

I’ve been thinking about what to write, and have been hesitating. However, there’s a new post on DownloadSquad, talking about how Microsoft has just bought Onfolio.

The big M will be adding Onfolio onto its Windows Live Toolbar as a free offering. I’m sure that won’t go well with those who ponied up $99 for their copies of Onfolio, but hey, now the rest of the world can share the wealth of your ’seed funding’. It will be interesting to see what Microsoft does with the Firefox integration of Onfolio, since nearly everything that is going into the Live strategy requires the proprietary Internet Explorer browser.

Enough is enough I said ;) I don’t have anything against Microsoft, but I figured this was a sign that I should just sit down and write this post. So, here are my two cents about Onfolio.

• Fortunately, I’m one of the lucky people that managed to get a free version of Onfolio way back in the summer, when they were offering free copies for whatever reason. That’s the only reason I actually used it so long, since I wasn’t about to spend $99 for it.
• Don’t get me wrong, it’s a very well executed program and it quite lovely to use, but I use it solely for entertainment purposes and can’t justify paying that much money for it.
• Just for entertainment you say? But why? It’s a great product for organizing your research. Here, I have to agree, if this was the only software I was using for my research. Unfortunately, Onfolio kept coming in second to my EverNote for research. I did force myself to use Onfolio for a few weeks, dutifully collecting things from the web, including pdfs of articles to read for research, etc. etc., but I found that I really wasn’t using it well. There were a couple of reasons for this.

• I organized Onfolio into several collections, say Home, Main, Research, etc. With the personal version (as opposed to Student or Professional), you can’t search across collections. So, to find something, I would have to first figure out where I would have put it.
• I found the search a tad slow, and a bit frustrating. Hard to figure out how to get back to the main category. Doable, but not intuitive.
• Anything that was put directly into Onfolio gets sucked into a collection file on my hard drive. These are not indexable/searchable by my Copernic Desktop Search. So, if I want to be able to find something both through CDS and Onfolio, I had to first save it to my hard drive, and then import it as a link into Onfolio. Too many steps. With that many steps, I could do the same thing and then bring a shortcut into EverNote, which is what I ended up doing.
• I thought about getting the Academic version, but I don’t use EndNote for my references. And figuring out how to port from EndNote to Bibtex just didn’t seem to be worth the effort, or the extra cash outlay. So, I stayed with the personal version.

• One of the biggest annoyances was the counter-intuitive ways of opening the documents that were linked in. If you double-click on a link, you end up getting a doc or pdf in “read-only” mode. You have to either right-click on it, or hit the proper icon to get it to open in edit mode. To me, this is counter-intuitive and I can’t count how many times I opened something, did something, and then lost the changes because I didn’t open in the right way.

Then, I read an interesting post by Merlin Mann on 43 folders about killing your RSS feeds. It struck a chord with me. I realized that I was a slave to my RSS feeds, salivating when I saw bold in the Onfolio pane. And I couldn’t just read one, I had to read them all! So I tried an experiment and turned off the automatic updating. I’m still experimenting with whether this makes me more productive, or just more likely to hit the refresh button. But it did highlight the fact that I had a very expensive piece of software all the time that I wasn’t using. After all, I don’t need to have Onfolio running all the time if I’m not letting it automatically update the feeds. So, I thought about replacing it with something more lightweight.

I haven’t quite decided to do so yet, just because it is just a darn good reader, that I didn’t have to pay alot for. I have looked at a few other options, such as BlogLines and Omeo. But I didn’t like them that much either. Right now I’m putting GreatNews through its paces. So far, it’s keeping up with me. Not as pretty as Onfolio, but lighter, and a bit more flexible, i.e., I can still see feeds that I’ve already read, if I want to. But, the jury is still out on who’s going to win.

As for whether or not you should use Onfolio, it really depends on what you want. If it’s going to be the only program you use to capture information from the internet, go right ahead. It will do that superbly. If you think you can incorporate both Onfolio and some other note-taking software, give it a whirl, even if just for a trial. If you want an amazing RSS reader, that too is a good use (although I wouldn’t pay $99 for an RSS reader). Hopefully this post helps :)

Remember the good old days, when if you wanted a personalized start page in your browser, you coded it from scratch? Well, at least I did. I don’t know how many hours I spent tweaking HTML in order to create a 5-6 column web page, with different coloured blocks, each one with a heading, and holding several links that I found invaluable. I’ve never found browsing bookmark folders to be that quick, and I wanted a start page that I could access from different computers, even when I wasn’t on one of my own computers.Anyway, some time ago, I discovered the Protopage, which is basically like a whiteboard, where you can put sticky notes. You could have just text in the notes, or a list of links, or even RSS feeds! In addition, they have a couple of widgets. And, you can have more than one page, which may or may not be open to the public. Plus, you can play with the colour schemes, and placement of your little sticky blocks. No more tweaking HTML by hand!

Since I’ve moved to Protopage, I’ve found another few sites that offer similar services. Here is my personalized start page roundup:

1. Protopage. By far my favourite, since it offers the most flexibility and content choice. You can have personalized news through RSS feeds, sticky notes, notes containing lists of links, weather, etc. Customize the colours, and placement of notes/panels that nobody else can touch. For example, you can place the panels so that they overlap each other. In addition, you can roll them up so you just see the headers, snap them to the docking panel, etc. Very cool.
2. Google personalized start page. Not only does it show you your gmail status, but it has other widgets, such as weather, quote of the day, movie listings for your postal code, etc. In fact, Google has just released some new ‘widgets’ for your customized start page. It’s not as flexible as Protopage, but sometimes you just want something quick.
3. PageFlakes. I thought this one has great promise, but it’s not quite as flexible as Protopage, i.e., items (called “flakes”) must be placed in columns and there’s not as much flexibility as what you can put, i.e., no block for just collecting notes. However, there is an API that you can access if you feel like hacking your own “flakes”. Here’s a review of PageFlakes by a Web 2.0 guru. (via Download Squad) Update [5 Mar 06]: As per the comment below, PageFlakes has corrected me - you can put notes. Actually, keep checking on the PageFlakes page - they keep updating the number of flakes that you can play with - it seems to have doubled since the last time I looked!
4. MyStickies. Not so much a true start page, but you could use it as such. The website describes it as “bookmarks on steroids”. This is a great bit of scripting goodness that lets you stick a sticky note on any web page! The sticky homepage then shows you where you have stuck stickies. And you can tag them (multiple tags); and it’s smart enough to track when you did such a thing, so you can see how fresh your sticky notes are. I think it’s a great idea, and am trying to make use of it more and more.
5. LinkedFeed. I found this one through a recent list of the most promising Web 2.0 applications. It was considered a runner up to PageFlakes, but I really like the look of it.

You may have noticed that I use del.icio.us tags to fake categories in my blogger.com blog. You can see the categories listed over in the right-hand column, sized by how many posts I have in each category. This bit of blogging goodness is courtesy of the del.icio.us tagroll functionality. I’ve also posted about how to incorporate tagging using technorati and del.icio.us.Now, there are even more del.icio.us tools than ever. In fact, it’s hard to keep up! So, here’s a list of places to find more information about getting the most out of del.icio.us. Not just for the wannabe be like me, but for the hard-core geek that uses del.icio.us tags for all of their surfing needs!

• Absolutely Del.icio.us - Complete Tool collection. Although it’s part of a blog, this post is constantly updated, so it’s sure to give you the latest and greatest of the del.icio.us tools. There are way too many tools to list, so take some time and check it out. If you’re not a hard-core del.icio.us user though, don’t be afraid. Start small, grasshopper.
• Listible’s Complete List of Tools and Utilities for del.icio.us. As of 19 Feb 06, there were 31 tools listed here, so quite a few less than on the previous list. However, you might find the layout more to your liking, as well as the rankings.
• Also, the del.icio.us/help page lists a few tools supported by del.icio.us itself, such as how to make an RSS feed of tags, link rolls, tag rolls, etc. In addition, they link to a thirdpartytools page, which doesn’t have too much on it right now, although there is a link to the Absolutely del.icio.us list above.
• Finally, I’ve come across a couple of other tools that I like. Note that these may or may not be listed in the Absolutely del.icio.us list above - it’s just too darned long to scroll through again!

• Delicious Mind Map Maker
• Not so much a tool, but a set of seven habits to become a “wildly successful” del.icio.us user.

And what are my favouite del.icio.us tools?

• FireFox extension
• del.icio.us tagrolls

I’m sure if I were a power user though, I’d be using a lot more!

I was trolling through my RSS feeds today, when I came across a link to a C|NET News article entitled “SNARFing your way through email“. The article itself was interesting, but what I found fascinating was a tool available on the C|NET page. It’s called the Big Picture, is powered by LivePlasma.com, and is essentially a map of how this article relates to other articles in the C|NET database. Here’s a shot of the full-screen image:

According to the help screen:

• it’s a way of “connecting the dots between stories, companies, and topics within the News.com site”
• you can “click on a bubble to center the display on that story, topic or company. New connections will be exposed with your selected story, topic or company as the focal point.”
• “The size of the story bubbles reflects the popularity of that story with News.com readers over time.”
• For every story published, News.com editors and reporters included relevant links to other News.com stories. In addition, News.com highlights the important companies that appear in a story as well as attach appropriate topics to each story.

I find the concept fascinating, not only because it provides an excellent service to the reader, but because of how much work must go in to maintaining a database of related articles. For example, some of the links in the image above date back 2+ years! Amazing. What a great way of giving the reader something extra; I love the ability to see other related material.

“All The Best Organizing Solutions In The ‘Organizer’s Toolbox’”

An organization geek treasure trove!