servers happy, tips and umberto eco

[electronic Max]

Dear note taking friends,

I completely overhauled the server code last weekend (yay for re-
writing code) for scalability. I forsee things being a lot more
reliable and fast now. Thanks for bearing with us the last couple
weeks when things were a little slow and creaky.

We had a couple questions about running your own server for list-it.
We're working on releasing our code for the server. We're short of
manpower right now -- the code is integrated with other stuff we've
built, and it's a little hairy. Please hang on tight. (We
eventually want to make list-it compatible with other standard web
protocols ~ so that people can easily make their own list-it clients)

I replied to someone asking for tips on using list-it below. Hope it's
of interest ...

Yours,
Max Van Kleek
list-it lead dev/designer
note taking and lifelogging research
MIT CSAIL ++ University of Southampton

PS Recommended Fall Reading : Umberto Eco, The Infinity of Lists :
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/dec/12/umberto-eco-lists-book-review

++

Well it really depends on what you find it useful for. We have a lot
of users who use it for keeping just to-dos and for bookmarking web
sites (they like it better than Firefox's built in bookmarking
feature). But it's also useful for shopping lists, bibliographic
references, meeting notes, class notes, keeping track of your fitness/
running program, the names of your neighbor's dogs, your distant half-
cousins, etc.

If you find you're accumulating too many notes and you would like to
see subsets of your notes quickly, you can save searches (type a
search word in and click on the '+' icon next to the search box).
That way you can make up your own tag syntax like @food or #forBob

if you have too many "beefy"/long notes overwhelming your list, you
can collapse them by clicking on the little arrow-in-circle icon on
the toolbar. This reduces all the notes to 1 line and is useful for
getting a high-level view of your notebook. Click it again and
they'll come back

We also have an "experimental" diary view (which is not yet perfect,
give us 2 weeks and we'll get to it!) which is currently hidden but
if you type

chrome://listit/content/diary/collage/diary.html

into your Firefox address bar where you've got list-it installed it
will access a full screen diary mode which we think is pretty groovy.
The line at the top is used for searching AND creating new notes--
just type, and hit enter

We also have a "pure HTML5" version and a Chrome version underway,
which will be a rewrite and should be very lovely. If you'd like to
try the HTML 5 version it's here:

http://welist.it/zen

Finally we invite you to our Google Group if you've got questions/
ideas http://groups.google.com/group/list-it

Hope this helps

Max
list-it lead architect/dev
note taking research
MIT CSAIL ++ University of Southampton