laterstars blog

bookmarklet!

Since we started the site I’ve been thinking of ways to get stuff that I don’t find on Twitter into laterstars. I basically want laterstars to be my One True Place for everything I want to save and read later, and I’ve got to admit that I don’t come across everything I’m interested in from my Twitter stream. So, what are the options?

My first idea was to tap into other services, much like we’re leveraging Twitter’s often overlooked favorites. Basically, the thought was to enter my delicious or pinboard user name and then monitor it every once in a while for links tagged with “laterstars” and it would pull them in much like faved tweets. Seems simple enough, and would let me use existing bookmarklets and even third party apps like Pukka. So, I started working on it.

As I started writing code, though, I began to realize it might not be the best approach. First off, the whole point of why I built laterstars was that I was dissatisfied with the other services and that I got most of my links from Twitter anyways… keeping those other services around, even just as a conduit, wasn’t something I really wanted to manage. Secondly, things just didn’t really map right to the laterstars format. Every link on laterstars originated from a tweet that someone else created, and you can always view that tweet to get the context of why you thought it looked interesting in the first place. Shoving random links into your inbox without that context just wouldn’t really work. Finally, it would cause a lot of work and rejiggering in the background of the site… which means it would really have to be worth it.

I wanted to gauge what everyone else thought, so I tweeted a quick little poll about it.

Overall, the response was that people either wanted a laterstars bookmarklet for adding stuff directly, or nothing at all, just stick with twitter faves. That at least let me know I was probably right about not wanting to move forward with the added complexity of pulling in from more sources… but I still wanted to be able to add random links here and there. Then, inspiration struck.

The best of both worlds would be to somehow combine a laterstars-specific bookmarklet for adding random links while still sticking to the Twitter universe… but how? Well, after thinking for a bit, I realized that while lots of pages I randomly browse to have never appeared in my Twitter stream from the couple hundred people I follow, there was a good chance that at least one of the millions of Twitter users all over the world has. If the bookmarklet could find those tweets, it could simply let me fave one of them, which would put it into my laterstars inbox just like as if I’d faved it from one of my followers.

Of course, there’s also a decent chance that the link has never been tweeted, so what would the fallback be? Well, since Twitter is pretty much the One True Way to get links into your laterstars inbox, why not just have the bookmark give you the opportunity to tweet it yourself and then autofave it so it shows up in your inbox? Assuming the link is somewhat interesting, chances are that your followers wouldn’t mind checking it out as well… that’s kind of the whole point of what we’re about.

However, if it’s really something that you don’t want to tweet, then I could just give you links to boring old pinboard and delicious right there… yawn.

So I spent the last couple days bringing this to reality. The first issue I ran into, though, was finding the tweets with the page links in them. I knew they were there, but since everyone uses url shorteners on Twitter, it was pretty much impossible to search for the actual urls… crap. Then I remembered the other day when we went to have beers at 21A the other day, there was this dude Brian who worked at a place called Topsy. Apparently they do Twitter search. So, I checked out their site and saw that they were awesome and did exactly what I needed - searching for a url and getting back all the tweets it knew about with that link in it, shortened or not. Awesome.

So really long story short, the bookmarklet is just about done and I think it’s pretty killer. Here are some preview screenshots.

The Bookmarklet

Bonus: on Safari, you can just click cmd-1 (or whatever number of its position) and it’ll fire.

The Window With Results

When Topsy finds tweet with the page’s url in them, we’ll display up to the first 10. Keyboard nav still works, so you can just hit enter right away and it’ll fave the first result and dismiss the window. Or you can navigate the results and fvae the one you want.

Already On Laterstars

If someone has already faved this link on laterstars, you can just copy it over to your account just like if you were browsing someone else’s page.

No One’s Tweeted This?!

On the off chance that no one has tweeted a link to the page, you can just start typing your tweet with the shortened link already in the message ready to go. When you tweet it, it will be autofaved and added to your laterstars inbox just like normal. Or, if you’re embarrassed about the link or something and really don’t want to tweet it, you could just save it to pinboard or delicious… the links will take you to their respective bookmarklet popup forms. But that’s a last resort.

So that’s where things are with the bookmarklet. I’m hoping to get it launched within the next couple days to let you all start playing with it. I’m pretty excited about it though, I think it’s going to be a pretty awesome way to discover and share new stuff, and it will definitely be one step closer to my desire to have laterstars be my One True Place for all my links. Let me know what you think!

account tab comes alive

Up until now, the only thing the account tab has been good for is logging in and out. There were some coming soon items in there for a while that didn’t do anything when you clicked as well, just holding a place for the real deal. Well no more. Let’ start from the top.

Invite Friends

We’ve given all users an invitation to send to a friend. Yeah, just one for now. Some of you have already noticed and used it, but for those of you who haven’t, just click it and you’ll get an invitation form:

Just fill out your friend’s Twitter screen name and hit send and you’ll send them a public @ message with a link to their activation page. No you can’t do a custom message just yet, still need to finish that up. We’ll be replenishing your invitation stock over time as we can handle more people.

Bookmarklets

As I wrote in the other article, I’ve been working on a laterstars specific bookmarklet that lets you add any page on the web that you come across, while still staying true to our focus on only grabbing links from Twitter faves. Check out the other article for a more detailed overview on how it works.

Aside from the main bookmarklet, we also have a few more available on the new bookmarklets page:

This one’s been covered.

Just a simple link to your laterstars inbox.

This one takes you to the oldest unread link you have. As long as you’re logged in, you’ll just go directly to the page. Once you’re done reading it, you can click it again and you’ll be taken directly to the next oldest in line. Click it again, etc. It’s a pretty cool way to just cycle through all your oldest stuff in a casual way. Give it a try.

Similar to the oldest link bookmarklet, this one just takes you to a random unread link. You can similar cycle through lots of random links this way, and since they’re all marked read as you view them, you’ll never see the same page twice. Again, a pretty cool way to clear out old unread links. Both of these were inspired by pinboard’s similar bookmarklets and were suggested by @marks. I’d never used them on pinboard and was skeptical, but after speaking with Mark and trying them for myself I became convinced.

Settings

Finally, we’ve begun the process of adding a few personalized settings to the app. We started with giving you control over how you want your Twitter favorites to be handled. Initially, the only time we touched your Twitter faves as by deleting them when you deleted a link on laterstars. The thinking is that even though we’re kind of overloading the whole concept of Twitter favorites by using them as “bookmarks” of sorts, it’s still nice to keep them somewhat clean and representative of what you like. So, if you starred a Tweet to save a link and you ended up not caring about the page it went to, deleting it from laterstars probably meant that you didn’t consider it a “favorite” on Twitter either, so we got rid of it automatically.

While this is probably fine for most people, we thought we should probably give you the choice of how this should be handled, so that we start out as just a read-only faves consumer, and you can adjust how you want things to be removed, if at all. So you can now choose:

The initial setting is now “never” - we’ll never touch your faves. I have mine set to the old behavior of deleting after I delete a laterstars link. The other options are pretty self-explanatory:

After archiving: we’ll delete the associated Twitter fave after you archive a link or delete it.

After reading: we’ll delete the associated Twitter fave after you read a link or delete it.

And for the hardcore, after importing: we’ll delete the associated Twitter fave after we import a link. This means that you’ll basically not have any faves on Twitter with links in them. We have this available for the people who enjoy faving Tweets that they think are funny and like to keep them very clean for that reason, but would also like to bookmark some links.

Article Previews

This was actually added a few weeks ago, albeit a bit under the radar… but, you can now preview any link within laterstars. As you’ve probably noticed, if a link is to something we detected as being media, like images and videos, there is an icon on the right side that is either a small preview (images) or a video service icon. If you click on that icon or tap ‘p’ on the keyboard, a larger preview will pop up real quick for you to check out. Usually, this is all I ever really need, and I don’t have to follow the link to the original site. (In fact, I might need to add an option to mark links as read when they’re previewed).

Having this for images and videos is great, but as much as I love to fave funny pics and stuff, the vast majority of my list is made up of links to actual articles… blog posts, stories on newspaper sites, stuff like that. This usually isn’t too bad — the keyboard nav makes it easy to open the links up and you can get through things pretty quickly. However, going to many of these sites is still a bit of a chore… they’re of questionable speed, might be down, and lots of times the part you actually want to read is buried within tons of noisy junk and javascript widgets.

A solution to this has been to use Readability once you get to the page. If you haven’t checked out Readability, it’s this awesome open source bookmarklet that goes through the page you’re on and tries to determine what the stuff you actually want to read is, then strips everything else out and leaves the text in nice, big, readable text. It’s a wonderful thing and I highly recommend it, it makes the web a more enjoyable place.

So, I figured the best thing to do would be to try to have that automatically applied to all the articles in laterstars. I did a bunch of experimentation with that using iFrames and wacky javascript, but in the end I ended up just attempting to port it to Ruby so I could process all the articles when they’re imported and save the processed copies. I say “attempted” because Readability is a bunch of pretty gnarly javascript doing somewhat strange things that “just work” and I haven’t quite been able to duplicate all the functionality… but, it works pretty well so far and I think it’s good enough to start using.

So now that all your links are getting run through this Ruby version (which will probably be called “Rudability” at the insistance of @3n and eventually open sourced) you can preview pretty much everything in your list - just click the new preview link within the gear menu, or just tap ‘p’ like you would for the image and video previews.

You’ll be presented with a stripped down version of the page right there above your list, with some images and videos left in if it they were deemed relevant. You can use the normal keyboard nav in the previews, so j & k scroll you up and down, shift+j/k page you up and down, and the arrows and space bar work as well. To get rid of it, just hit escape or ‘p’ or use your mouse, it’s all pretty flexible.

Just like the other previews, these are usually all I really need when I want to read the articles in my list. I still visit the original links a lot to get the full view or check out comments, but for most things the preview is perfect.

You might occasionally get a “sorry we couldn’t generate a preview” message which will give you a link to the original article… like I said, this is very much a work in progress, so if you come across some things that don’t work that seem like they should, just let us know.

Oh, and a nice side-effect of having these stripped down preview versions sitting around? They’re perfect for reading on an iPad… more on that in the next post :)

New One-Click Bookmarklet - Click It And Forget It™

We already have a pretty sweet bookmarklet that searches for all the tweets that link to whatever page you’re on and lets you choose one to fave so it gets imported into your laterstars. I’m still surprised by how many pages I want to save that have already been tweeted at some point, letting me save it with minimal effort. However, the way the existing version works, it still requires some input from you to choose a tweet to fave, or have you tweet it yourself if no one’s ever tweeted it before.

Usually this is fine, and I actually like seeing what tweets are found and choosing the best one to fave. But, like any good entitled and lazy internet user, that’s more effort than I want to exert sometimes. WHY CAN’T I JUST CLICK A FAVE BUTTON AND BE DONE WITH IT!?

Well-meaning enabler that I am, this higher level of laziness is now possible. Introducing the One-Click Fave™ (experimental) bookmarklet, by laterstars:

With this bookmarklet, whenever you want to fave and save a link to your laterstars, just click the button and it gets queued off in the background, letting you continue on your way without having to think at all.

How does it work? It’s a pretty simple process…

1. First we check if the link has already been faved on laterstars. If it has, we copy the first faved link over to your account, as if you copied it from another user’s page.
2. If it doesn’t find the link on laterstars, it fires off a Topsy search for the url. If it finds tweets that link to it, we fave the first one it finds for you and then immediately import that it in.
3. If Topsy doesn’t return anything, we get a bit tricky… we created a new Twitter account at @liwt (which stand for Links I Won’t Tweet). If we reach this step, that account tweets the link for you, and then we fave that tweet and import it into your account.

As you can see, we attribute it to you, so people hopefully don’t get silly and save a bunch of rude links or something.

All these steps happen in the background, so you can just click the bookmarklet on the page and continue on with your business… when you go to your laterstars later on, the links should be there waiting for you. It’s called experimental for now, though, because we’re not sure if it’s going to work 100% of the time since there’s no real human interaction. But, it should work just fine.

Here’s a quick video of the whole process:

Let me know what you think!

Privacy Settings and Upcoming Public Viewable Pages

Laterstars is still within an invite-only beta period, and only activated members can view any pages besides the initial signup form. Once you’re in, however, you can view other peoples’ links. This turns out to be pretty awesome because you can go through and copy all the interesting links you find that  you would have never seen otherwise to your account. Personally, I’ve found some of the best links lately while going through other peoples’ pages, and this process will be even easier once subscriptions are live.

New - Privacy Settings

Starting now, however, you can make your account private via your settings page. At this point, if you make your account private no one else will be able to view the links but yourself. In the future there may be the ability to allow certain people to view your links, similar to Twitter, and maybe even per-link privacy settings, but for now if you just want to collect your links for your own viewing this is the way to go.

To start, everyone’s privacy setting has been aligned to their Twitter setting, so if you have a protected Twitter account, your laterstars account is now set to private as well. This is just a one time alignment though - you can have a private laterstars account and a public Twitter account and vice-versa if you want.

While you’re browsing the users pages now, you’ll see private accounts marked with a lock icon:

You can click on these users all you want, you’ll just be greeted with a page saying you can’t view it.

Coming Soon - Viewable By The General Public

While this is nice for excluding other laterstars users if you don’t want them to see what you’re into, it will be of more importance in a week or so when we open up the viewing of link pages to the general public. This means that while link collection will still be limited to activated members for the foreseeable future, anyone will be able to view all the kick-ass links we’ve all collected over the last few months. You’ll be able to send people to your laterstars page so they can see what stuff you’re into and share all the cool things you’ve found. Hopefully it will let people discover things they never would have come across, and even spark some new Twitter friendships and followings.

But, if you really don’t want anyone in the world to check out your links, just make sure you set your account to be private. Again, it will already be set to private if your Twitter account is protected. Also, keep in mind that anyone in the world is already able to view your favorites on Twitter right now if you have a public account, but just know you have the ability keep your laterstars to yourself if you want. I hope most people choose to make their links public and share them as much as possible since there’s so much great stuff out there, but if you require privacy that is perfectly understandable, and now possible.

As always, please let me know what you think! Leave comments or @takeo me with any thoughts.

Public Profiles and Top Links Now Live

One of the main things I wanted to do with laterstars from the very beginning was use it as a way of finding interesting links that I’d never come across on my own. Ever since the site started I’ve gone through and browsed peoples’ profiles from time to time and consistently came across some really cool stuff that people had faved from within their Twitter streams. There’s no way I’d ever come across most of these links since following more than the 250 or so people I already do on Twitter would just be way too much to deal with. Randomly seeing what some other people have chosen for themselves usually comes up with high quality links with much less filtering on my part… lots of interesting articles ranging from css techniques to interesting new startups to funny images and videos. The fact that the laterstars community has been pretty self selecting and is mostly comprised of people similar to myself (designers, web developers, music lovers, etc) doesn’t hurt either. So, I’ve been copying tons of links over to my account to read later (‘c’ keyboard shortcut or the ‘copy to your account’ link from the gear button).

laterstars top links

I always knew that once there were enough people using the service, and I had the time to work on it, that it would be pretty interesting to see what everyone was faving at that time. So, after some experimentation, an early version of the top laterstars across everyone’s accounts is now live. What it basically does is find all the faves people have made recently and runs it through a relatively simple algorithm to figure out what the hottest things are at that moment in time and presents it in a tumblelog style format. Even though it’s pretty basic, it floats some pretty cool stuff to the top that really reflects what the community is interested in at that moment. For instance, as I write this post, the list has a life hack about becoming an early riser, a link to the new Sharpie Liquid Pencil, an article about Riak and Clojure, an interview with @badbanana, a tutorial on making kickass CSS3 buttons, and tons more. By the time this is posted it’ll be a totally different set of links. If you see anything that looks interesting, just click the star icon and it’ll get faved and copied to your account. It’ll also give that link some more reason for staying in the top 20 and maybe even move it up the ranks.

If you’re not logged in and you go to laterstars.com, you’ll be shown the top links page by default so you can see what type of stuff people are faving to get an idea of what laterstars is all about. If you are logged in, however, you’ll still be taken to your inbox by default so you can start going through all your links just like normal. Either way, you can always get to the top links with the new top links button in the top nav bar.

One thing to keep in mind, though, is that this is all still super new, so there will be some rough spots… some duplicate articles make it through, some summary paragraphs are too short/too long/too nonsensical, and the ranking algorithm will be continuously tweaked… but for the most part things are working pretty well. Give it a try, copy some stuff over, and let us know what you think!

Public Profiles Now Public

As I posted about before, the plan has been to begin opening up the beta to the public, starting with making everyone’s links available for public browsing. A while back we introduced privacy options so you could make your links visible only to yourself if you don’t want people to see what you’ve been faving, and brought over your protected account status from Twitter when you joined. Now, the beta locks are starting to be lifted and everyone who isn’t set to private (either by doing it manually in account > settings or having a private twitter account) can now have their links seen by the world. So start posting links to your pages to show everyone all the cool stuff you’re finding, and browse everyone else’s links to see what they’re finding!

Invite Your Friends

Now that things are a lot more public, we’re not going to be having people sign up and then sending out DM invites later… instead we’re giving everyone some more invites to give out to their friends, starting with 5 right now, and we’ll be refreshing them regularly. Like I mentioned earlier, the reason the top links are so interesting is that the laterstars community is really good at finding cool stuff on twitter (or using the bookmarklets). If you all keep inviting other interesting people, it’ll only get better.

If you have don’t have an invite-activated account, you can still copy links over from the top links or anyone else’s page and build up a nice collection of links. But, the true magic of laterstars lies in being able to fave tweets from any device wherever you are and have them automatically imported, so if you need an invite just ask twitter for one!

@takeo