Licorize' Blog

In this blog post: What I want from a delicious replacement? Jane Dallaway defines a set of requirements that a Delicious replacement should satisfy. Lets examine the requirements one by one and see how Licorize meets them:

• Ability to tag my bookmarks 

Of course. Also tags containing spaces are supported.

• Ability to export my bookmarks annotated with tags (and notes if appropriate) 

You can export your bookmarks in html (readable by most other services), and even in an Excel sheet. You can expose them directly on the web to non Licorize users in a “booklet”: see here. Even for bookmarks in a private collection (“project”) you can decide to share a single bookmark.

• Ability to import my delicious bookmarks keeping the tags and notes

Licorize import does this.

• Ability to bookmark pages from a browser via a bookmarklet

Licorize has a bookmarklet, a plug-in for Firefox, extensions for Chrome and Safari. You can also add (with a trick) the bookmarklet to Safari for iPad, iPhone and Android Chrome: here instructions.

• Ability to bookmark an article from my RSS reader (google reader on my laptop/work PC and Reeder on my iPhone) 

Licorize syncs with any number of RSS. Moreover you can add a button to Google Reader “send to Licorize”.

• Ability to bookmark a page through instapaper on the iPhone (currently I use ping.fm to do this for delicious via email which is a bit of a kludge) 

You can directly bookmark a page on the iPhone to Licorize.

• Ability to search through my bookmarks to re-locate a site based on tag or notes:

In Licorize you can filter by tag, tags, contents, date, people, projects.

And very interestingly she makes this observation at the end:

I’m not too bothered about the social networking side of things with my bookmarks so I don’t really have any requirements around this at the moment. I tend to read most content currently via Reeder or Instapaper, both of which have email capacity so I tend to fire off an email containing the link and annotations to relevant people, or even copy and paste the link into a tweet where appropriate.  I don’t feel the need to create yet another social presence at this time.

Not this fits perfectly with the philosophy of bookmarking with which we built Licorize – bookmarking more as a personal and team oriented constructive activity, more than for generically social sharing.

Of course this does not mean that Miss Dallaway will like Licorize – fortunately, there are different tastes and perspectives!

Licorize imports your bookmarks from Delicious / Instapaper/ Firefox / Chrome / Safari / Opera / Internet Explorer. You can also sync them with Read It Later. Here we will explain in detail how to migrate from Delicious to Licorize.

To migrate your bookmarks requires first that you export them from Delicious to another format. Here is a video showing the entire migration process:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=US&v=qVBaYFZl7i0

Export Your Delicious Bookmarks to HTML file

To export your data, log into Delicious, and click on the Settings link at the top-right:

On the Settings page, click on the link to Export / Backup Bookmarks, getting:

You probably want to include at least the tags.

You could also take the opportunity for exporting a subset of your bookmarks (filtering only those with certain tags – select the last checkbox) in order to restart with a manageable set.

Click “export”, and you will obtain an HTML file readable from any browser, and also by Licorize.

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Import bookmarks in Licorize

First log in Licorize.  To launch the imports click on “tools” in the top menu and then on “Import/export bookmarks”:

Getting:

Select “Import” and you’ll get to:

Here you can upload your file with your Delicious bookmarks:

Browse and then click on “load the file”. Once the upload is completed, the import will start. You will not see all the bookmarks (with tags and all) immediately, but it should not take too much. It may take a bit more to have all the thumbnails for those bookmarks (an additional service that Licorize provides).

That’s it – now Licorize will help you put together ideas, projects, to-dos, filtered presentations and more from your bookmark collection.

In this update some features facilitating sharing and formatting contents.

Permalink

Every strip now has a permalink, which means that you can send a link to anyone, also a non Licorize user, and they will be able to see the content on that strip on the web – no login necessary. So you can share single strips contents, say on Twitter.

Just open the strip editor to see the permalink.

This way you are bypassing your project security: the strip will be visible even if the project is not public. For this reason, the permalink key is not exactly easy to guess

Layout: Bold and …

We’ve began to insert some formatting of the notes you take: our first step is to allow “bold”, so that for example you can put titles in notes. To format any text in bold just surround it with “**”. So to have This is the title in bold in your note, just write

**This is the title**

We also changed the logic on how the used and non used tags for the current selection are visualized: hopefully it should not need any explanation .

Bug fixes

- Fix on weekly review: you could close a project that you didn’t own.

- Fix on list of teams: if you remove yourself from a team you no longer see that team even if you created strips in it.

- Backgrounds: the new chosen one is now applied immediately.

- Magic wands: you could never win a second one.

Licorize has just been updated: we released a public API so that you can integrate your cool applications with the Licorize service. The API works with OAuth and XAuth. For example, one of the easiest integrations is to add a “send to Licorize” button when displaying some contents.

Moreover we released a script for embedding any filtered set of strips (a booklet) in your web pages. See here for all details.

This release contains several major improvements and new services for users.

Mobile support

Now the Licorize web service detects whether you are reaching the service through a mobile device and provides a specific web interface, optimized for a reduced screen and a touch interface.

The service is presented here.

Most mobile devices are supported, Apple and Android devices, and also several others.

Mobile support is a beta version.

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To be read and read items

As suggested by many, the “to be read” / “read” dynamics was only partially supported by Licorize. We introduced two new specific types: the “Remind me later” type, which behaves like a bookmark but is specialized so to make it immediate to filter by this kind of bookmark, and also exhibiting a specific behavior: the possibility of transforming a “Remind me later” item in a read item. Read items (differently from “done” items”) don’t disappear from projects, as they can constitute a sort of “bibliography”.

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More fun & feedback

We did several small improvements to improve fun & usability:

- “magic wand”: when you acquire a large number of points, you gain the possibility of touching another user with a magic wand a make the gift of a 100 new points

- Customized backgrounds (only Premium users): you can now go to your settings and pick one of 7 different backgrounds.

- Weekly review more friendly: in case you skip a strip in the review, a visible warning is displayed. Also the black dots are less invasive.

Coming soon

In the coming days we will publish the Licorize API service and improvements on the booklets.

Bug fixes

- Bookmarking: large pages could sometimes not be bookmarked.

- Evernote: a fix on URL transformations.

- Some strips had doubled tags in some cases of tag renaming.