Karen Coombs on FURL
July 1st, 2004Karen Coombs has some neat FURL tricks:
“One thing that readers of this site may not realize is that the resources section of the site is driven by Furl. Well sort of… You can export all your Furled items as XML. This provides an archive you can keep on your own machine and removes for me the concern about Furl dying or becoming unaffordable. So, to get the resource pages on the site to work I export my Furl archive as XML. Then I use that XML to drive my resource pages. I have an XSLT written that formats things nicely and selects the desired content. Lastly, I use ASP to put the XML and XSLT together.
The downside of this method is that I need to export the XML regularly. I don’t see this as a problem. It takes five minutes. However, it means I can control the presentation of my links any way I like. In fact, the resource pages don’t contain all my Furled links. Just the just I think is most applicable to web-technologies. If you want to see the whole batch visit my Furl archive at http://www.furl.net/members/libwebchic
Another Furl trick that I would reccomend is that you can display the latest links you have Furled as part of your site by using the RSS feed for your Furl archive. For more technical details on this see the story I did on Incorporating XML content in your website.”
Thanks Karen!! If you want to see what Karen has “Furled”, just subscribe to her Furl RSS Feed (which I just did). I have been more partial to Del.icio.us for my online bookmarking needs because of its “no frills” look, which I like better. But Furl is just as good, with more bells and whistles.
FYI, one of my upcoming columns for Public Libraries magazine is on these social bookmarking tools. I think it will appear in the September/October issue…