First, an important update: if you are not subscribed to my feedburner URL that I switched to a long time ago, please switch your subscription to http://feeds.feedburner.com/AlexBosworth. I am moving my blog to SWiK: increased growth of SWiK traffic over the past few months has meant that we have needed to switch our setup to a more load-balanced setup across more webservers. Rather than struggle with MovableType, which has been having a series of problems, I’m just going to blog solely on this blog, which I was only cross posting to before. If you are subscribed to the RSS feed, you shouldn’t even notice the difference though.

Boz news

It’s been a month since I released boz – an aes encrypted, (open source) private bookmarking service. Today I rolled out the latest update, adding bookmarks export, rss support, and n-way tagging, as well as a tag search box.

RSS support was a tricky problem from the encryption standpoint. I use Firefox RSS integration with my del.icio.us bookmarks, and I really wanted the same functionality in boz. There are a handful of bookmarks that are sensitive and certainly not ‘social’, that I still want to have in my firefox livebookmarks. But Firefox can’t decrypt an encrypted RSS feed. The solution is to attach labels to bookmarks that should be included in an RSS feed. The labels can be generic if I don’t want to give away the purpose of the link, but in any case the real title and link of the bookmark is protected by the encryption.

• Encrypted tagging
  • tag cloud
  • tag autocompletion
  • tag search
• Starred bookmarks – ala gmail
• RSS feed – add cleartext labels to bookmarks to have them appear in an rss feed. The link address and title remain encrypted.
• export: pull out an encrypted stream of bookmarks

I’m biased, but I have to take back what I said earlier about private and public bookmarks not mixing. I’ve found that they do, because I’ve found myself only bookmarking encrypted bookmarks on boz and not really anything more on del.icio.us. I like to bookmark stupid stuff as well as internal intranet urls, and I am too lazy to figure out if it should be posted to del.icio.us or boz, so sorry if you are one of my network buddies on del.icio.us but this is part of the reason for the rash of updates to boz this month.

boz was originally written to replace a previous project that del.icio.us put the kibosh on called priv.at, and I wrote an importer for people who wanted to migrate bookmarks they saved there that were wiped by del.icio.us, but some have asked for a migration tool to encrypt their existing normal del.icio.us bookmarks in boz. I’m not sure if this is a big demand, but if people want to migrate their bookmarks to boz, let me know, it wouldn’t be too hard to adjust my existing migration script.

VideoBookmarks

I’ve updated VideoBookmarks, the application I built on wikiality to display the most recently bookmarked videos. The most recent update deals with a problem that I’ve had to deal with with delimages—people bookmark the same thing over and over.

VideoBookmarks now tries to only show the same video once.