December 9, 2005: Protopage
There’s a new web service in town.
Posted on 2005-12-09 11:00 by Jørn Støylen [permalink]
Today I checked out Protopage, after seeing it referenced in a couple of other blogs during the last week. I initially dismissed it on account of me thinking it was just a web page where you could make your own sticky notes. Well, it is, but it’s also very useful to me.
See, lately I’ve been wanting to make a few web pages with links to all the different web services etc. I use. See, regular in-browser bookmarks suck for several reasons. First of all, if you add a bookmark it’s buried deep in the UI, never to be used again. Then, since they’re forgotten, they just multiply and rot. Actually, I’ve been using del.icio.us more than bookmarks lately, because of another reason why bookmarks suck: They’re local to each computer, which discourages bookmarking for people who have to use several different computers.
Enter Protopage. Here, you can edit content as rich text or HTML code. I prefer the latter for lists of links, since the links panels are too disorganized for my tastes. (Basically you just get all your links inline, one after another.)
The HTML code, in effect, is both constrained and at the same time relaxed: Constrained in the sense that you can use some HTML tags and some style elements, but other stuff is stripped if you try to add it. Relaxed in the sense that you don’t have to think about placement of your content, you can just drag it around and resize as you see fit.
I would very much like to be able to set it to edit HTML by default instead of rich text. Or, maybe even better, that each sticky note could remember the editing mode you used last. (I have suggested this to them already, feel free to do the same if you agree with me, and maybe we’ll make it happen!)
Of course, I could just hand code personal link pages and put them on my own server, but the threshold for adding/changing the pages would be much higher since it’d all be done by manual coding. Or I could make a system like Protopage myself, but then I’d be reinventing the wheel all over again.
One thing that an online friend pointed out: The title of the Protopage front page is: Protopage v2 released – free AJAX start pages now with RSS news feeds, sticky notes and bookmarks. I’m not much for all the Ajax/Web 2.0 hype either, I just like many of the products/applications.
The cool thing is that it actually fills a need I for me. It enables me to do something about it NOW, rather than postpone it because making and updating a personal, manual page would be too many decisions about how it’s going to look, how I’m going to code it, too much work to keep up-to-date etc. This is something my mind resists. (To paraphrase David Allen: If it’s not easy and fun, your mind will resist and you won’t do it.)
Personally, if I’d made Protopage, I wouldn’t have fronted it as Ajax or Web 2.0 or anything. What does it matter what kind of technology it uses? The important thing is that it enables you to do what you want, in a fun and easy way.
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