For the last 2.5 years I've been working on my spare time on a side project, and now I'm ready to move it into the private beta testing phase.
What is this project about?
It's a web app for managing your online knowledge resources:
You can store and manage your bookmarks
You can write new text documents with code snippets and links to i.e. your stored bookmarks
You can add notes to any of your bookmarks, documents, folders, etc.
But it's also a social network! You can go into other users collections, see all of their publicly-shared items and, if you like them, you can copy them to your own collections .
What type of users am I looking for the beta testing phase?
For this private beta testing phase I'm looking for users that would find such tool useful; users with a lot of links / online learning resources to manage.
Why am I asking this in URLO?
During my career as a software developer, I often found myself stressed because of the amount of things I had or wanted to learn, and just didn't find existing KMS apps tailored for my needs. That's why I started working on this as a side project, and I truly believe that other software developers might find it useful as well. Plus, the backend is written in Rust .
If you would like to participate in the private beta testing phase, I would really appreciate it and be very grateful. Just reply to this thread and I will reach out via P.M. with all the details. I'm aiming to start the beta testing on the week of the 30th. of October and run it for a couple of weeks.
What do I expect from beta testers?
Nothing formal. Just your honest feedback. And if you liked it, maybe your wishlist on what would you like to see before the project goes live .
This is very interesting!
Managing my bookmarks is something I didn't find a perfect solution yet and I even wanted to implement something myself but unfortunately never had the time to do so. That's why I'd very much like to test your web app
I've used xBrowserSync in the past and currently manage my bookmarks with Raindrop. With xBrowserSync I had all bookmarks in one place and management through the browser's native interface was ok but nothing I really enjoyed. Using Raindrop nowadays managing my bookmarks is very nice through their web app.
But what they're both lacking is some sort of start page or "home screen" where you can place the most important bookmarks and folders alongside with some widgets (like a search bar) which you can set as your browser's home page (and install as a progressive web app on mobile). This is exactly what I planned on developing myself (by using the xBrowserSync's or Raindrop.io's API).
This is by no means a feature request, but maybe you want to check out the services I used/use to get some inspiration and maybe you even like the "home page" idea.
Interesting! Didn't know about xBrowserSync, but I did know about Raindrop.
It's a fun story actually. When I did my research on the status-quo for bookmark managing apps almost 3 years ago, Raindrop was the closest to what I wanted to build. So close indeed that I only spent a couple of hours looking at the UI and features to take notes on the things that I liked and the things that I didn't like, so that I wouldn't give the impression of taking too much "inspiration" from it due to my big respect for the developer behind the app (I loved the idea of a developer dedicated full-time to his project, so I didn't want to give him the impression of stealing his ideas). Now after 2.5 years I decided to go back to use Raindrop and compare what I have built with the current status of Raindrop (to give you an idea, back in the days Raindrop didn't allow users with free accounts to create folders, it was a "Pro version" feature), since now I consider that my app has its own "essence". Interestingly, I have found a lot of similarities, even in those features that I "thought" by myself and didn't take inspiration from Raindrop. I guess that working on the same domain, one way or another, will make certain features to converge.
As for your wish for a homepage, I do actually have a page dedicated for such feature... but so far has been delayed since I needed to focus on implementing the core features first (Currently it only says "Coming soon..."). Your post actually reminded me of a "core value" that I wanted for my project when I started it, but has been delayed for the reasons mentioned above: I wanted a social media where the user was in control of the content to be consumed. Your suggestion is aligned with this core value in the sense that it's about personalization of the user experience, and I like the idea of having widgets for it . So far the only other petition that I have received for this section is about receiving "updates" from users you follow.
Will send you the details to access the website before the private beta testing begins, @biwecka .
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