linkblog

Way overdue New Year’s resolutions!

We’ve been terribly busy: since our announcement last november of our hundredth signup, another two hundred users have joined the fun. And because of this, we’ve been more quiet then I would like, and I want to apologize.

It feels that we’ve spent almost all of our time uncomfortably bursting at the seams; we’ve always been at pretty much close to capacity, as this project is not our day job! We’ve worked very hard to keep the system asusable as possible in that time.

However, I feel that during this very exciting time for the team I’ve personally had less capacity for talking more openly to the our small but growing community about what’s been going on. Given that we’ve undergone a lot of changes and have a lot more in store in the future, I want to resolve to be better about communicating.

More soon from all of us!

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‘Bag of the week’ for January 28, 2008

This week, a great selection of links from user i1135t. It’s a great way to resume our weekly feature articles after a brief impromptu fall/winter break. 

 i1135t offers up a pretty eclectic mix of bags featuring Firefox, Music, Lifehacker, Online TV, Online Web Utilities, GMAIL Tweaks, Techie Resources, Freeware, Linux, and Ubuntu! Whew!

A brief sampling reveals a slew of useful links, chief among them this Lifehacker link. Not only do the editors over at Lifehacker feed our heads with a feast of posts every day, every once in a while they put their programming chops to good use and build custom software for their readers. Check out all the open soure goodness here.

In i1135t’s music bag we happened upon Music Map—the tourist map of music. Even if you don’t know what you are looking for—the music map will find it.  Music Map is a self-adapting system that learns about the outer world by asking its visitors what they like and what they don’t like. It is a kind of a search engine for music you don’t know about. It will ask you what music you like and then think about what you might like too.

Last but not least is the Techie Resources bag. Chief among these links is Ask the Admin—a site dedicated to answering your technical related questions. As a collective they have loads of information stored away in their ‘meat computers’ but occasionally they will have to go out and search the interwebs for an answer. They also review new products, services and pretty much anything that will improve our quality of life.

Thanks i1135t! A great bag o’ links—a great way. Check the rest of ‘em out here.

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RSS feeds your head!

Bet you didn’t know that well over 50 per cent of the requests seen by LinkBag are for RSS feeds! That means that users cruising around our site with browsers are actually in the minority when it comes down to pure traffic. Instead, our heaviest resource users include personalized home pages and desktop news aggregators.

With that in mind, it makes sense to remember that even the smallest changes can have a really big impact. Thus, given that our feeds have been doing a decent job this far, they haven’t changed much from their simple beginnings.

Decent isn’t perfect, though. So, our team’s been working on some small improvements. We’ve been looking into how our feeds are used and how to better streamline and present our information in different contexts. These improvements include features like:

• Offering the ability to save bookmarks straight from your feed reader.
• Building more useful feed content with links to people, tags, and more bookmark details;
• Providing more metadata where it seems useful, or less where it appears redundant.

And, this is just the start. We’re putting out these changes gradually, on a per-user basis, and we’re planning for more. So, if you don’t see any improvements in your favourite feed reader yet—or if the changes haven’t quite hit their mark for you—be sure to contact us and let us know!

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‘Bag of the week’ for November 20, 2007

Aside from stuffing our faces with 7,000 calories worth of food on Thanksgiving, Americans (and Canadians but one month earlier) are supposed to reflect on what we’re most thankful for. While things like LOLcatz and coffee definitely make the list (oh right, and our families and friends, we guess), we wanted to show a little appreciation for the our users as well.

The LinkBag staff would link to thank all of of users! 

As an extra special holiday treat, we present to you a turkey-flavoured Tuesday feature — our third installment of the ‘bag of the week’. The ‘bag of the week’ features interesting, provocative, and irreverent web sites culled from linkbag’s users. Each week we feature a new ‘bag’.

This week, we’re featuring “Playable Web Games” via diggsby’s linkbag. This is a bag of “Fun free online games to play during your office coffee break or when you are in the zone at home.”

This offbeat bag includes —

1. Play hundreds of classic Nintendo 8-bit games on-line
   Super Mario Brothers, Zelda, Mega Man, Castle-Vania and most of the other classic Nintendo titles playable directly in the browser without download.
2. The most incredibly messed up “Choose Your Own Adventure” you’ll ever play
   Join the circus. Start a nuclear war. Go back in time and sleep with your mother. Play the first two levels of Castlevania. I don’t remember the books being like this when I was a kid!
3. Play Lemmings in your browser
   Remake of lemmings that can be played in your browser. Bringing the old school to the new school.
4. The Weirdest Flash Game You Will Play All Day
   There is no way to explain this one.

Thanks to diggsby for putting together such a cool collection. Thanks and stay tuned for next week’s ‘bag of the week’!

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LinkBag Wordpress Widget almost ready!

Many blogging platforms work well with linkbag, thanks to our RSS feeds. But if you are looking for a really simple way to have your latest linkbag bookmarks displayed as part of your wordpress blog, you might want to try our widget. Using it is as simple as uploading a widget to your wordpress blog!

Instead of forcing a specific style, we’ve tried to make them unobtrusive enough that they should blend in with the look of your blog. We’re almost done testing — but you can see it in operation here and on our own sidebar.

More soon from us!

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‘Bag of the week’ for November 6, 2007

Welcome to our regular Tuesday feature, and now, our second-ever ‘bag of the week’. The ‘bag of the week’ features interesting, provocative, and irreverent web sites culled from linkbag’s users. Each week we feature a new ‘bag’. This week, we’re featuring “Offbeat News” via stevenl’s linkbag. This is a bag of “weird, odd, strange, funny, offbeat, or crazy, but true news stories in the US and around the world provided by various news sites like Yahoo, Reuters and, [stevenl’s] favorite, Digg!”

This offbeat bag includes —

1. 16 Headstones That Make You Go Hmmmm…
   Benjamin Franklin said: “Show me your cemeteries, and I will tell you what kind of people you have.” Some must-see stuff here.
2. 8-year-old Ohio twins gain fame for anti-wedgie underwear design using fabric fastener
   Using rigged boxers and fabric fasteners to hold together some seams, Jared and Justin Serovich came up with the Rip Away 1000. “When the person tries to grab you - like the bully or the person tries to give you a wedgie - they just rip away,” Justin explained on The Ellen DeGeneres Show.
3. Student finds baroque painting inside old sofa
   Berlin student who bought a second-hand sofa bed at a flea market learned she had been sitting on a small fortune when she found a baroque painting hidden inside the couch.
4. Lawn-watering spat leads to death 
   A 66-year-old man was bashed to death while watering his lawn in an argument over Sydney’s water restrictions, police and media said Thursday.
5. New species of ‘giant wild pig’ discovered hidden in the Amazon jungle
   A new species of wild pig previously unknown to science has been discovered in the Brazilian jungle. The large creature grows to a length of more than four feet and is almost twice as heavy as its nearest relative. Named the ‘giant peccary’, the creature was unknown until the skins and bones of animals were found by a biologist.

Thanks and stay tuned for next week’s ‘bag of the week’. Same blog time, same blog channel!

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First-ever ‘bag of the week’

Welcome to our first-ever ‘bag of the week’. The ‘bag of the week’ features interesting, provocative, and irreverent web sites culled from linkbag’s users. Each week we’ll feature a new ‘bag’.

This week, we’re featuring “Time Wasters” via links’s linkbag list. Say that 10 times fast!

This is a collection of “some fun and pointless time wasting sites on the net.” This eclectic bag includes —

• I Can Has Cheezburger—home of the LOLcat
• The Falling Sand Game—The game involves four different particles falling from the top of the screen, which all look and move similar to sand. The particles resemble sand, water, salt, and oil in color. Along with these four, additional elements can be placed on the screen with the mouse, some that are solid and stationary instead of flowing. By mixing the different elements together, many colorful designs, complex structures, and systems can be create.
• Stuff on my cat—Do you like to put stuff on your cat? So do we! See pictures of cats with various items stacked on top of them. What’s on your cat?

And many other great time-wasters. But, to be honest, we got caught up surfing around Stuff on my cat and neglected to check out the rest —why don’t you?

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Welcome to the official linkbag blog!

Welcome to the brand new linkblog (blog.linkbag.com). In the interest of increasing communication with our users, we’ve decided to launch ourselves into the blogosphere and begin a corporate blog!

We’ll talk about linkbag, upcoming features, site status and bunny pictures. We also will be using it as a showcase for our coming blog integration tools and to highlight some of the great stuff people have done with linkbag. Anyway, we’re excited the blog’s up. We’re going to post stuff here—regular bloggy things: What we had for breakfast, etc

And perhaps, news about linkbag, and our thoughts on whatever random events cross our horizon.

And, of course, once a week, we’ll feature a link!

Oh, and we have email feedback too. So we hope to hear from you, as well.

Anyway, welcome aboard!

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