First of all, Happy New Year to everyone! I haven't been maintaining my site for quite a while since I started a new job a couple of months ago which kept me occupied for most of my time.

First thing for the new year was an upgrade to the latest version of Habari which has been released in December. As always, it went nice and smoothly. One of my next actions will be a major cleanup of the site content. But only if I find the time to do it ;-)

I was digging through a bunch of old gaming stuff and came across an icon only the seasoned gamers amongst you might remember: The Dopefish!

My first contact with this creature was back in 1996 when playing Quake. If you too played that game thoroughly you will most likely remember this scene:

There he is! Although it's not his first occurrence. As I learned, he was born in late 1990 and has appeared in numerous games since. Check his dedicated website for all the details and history.

And if you'd like to decorate some of your stuff with his most popular appearance, here is a SVG file for you.

Always remember: The Dopefish lives!

Just a short post to send out greetings from the Rutenfest 2011. Here's a nice shot i took from the top of a Ferris wheel:

The image quality sucks thanks to my old Nokia phone *mmpf*

From my experience, using the traditional way of bookmarking in multiple browsers ends in a complete mess. I've spent countless hours in getting my bookmarks in sync between my computers at home, at work and elsewhere and all the different browsers I use. The more my list of bookmarks grew, the more tedious the process of synchronization got.

But, as for most issues, there are several ways to solve it.

First, you may use one of the countless online services or social bookmarking sites such as delicious.com or diigo.com to get your bookmarks organized. While some of them have great features and functions to share bookmarks (if this is your intention), I never trusted them. It's far to easy to create a nice profile of you and your interests, just by analyzing your bookmarks and how often you click them. Now, call me paranoid, but I bet that's what most of these free services are doing in order to sell data to market research companies and the like. Anyways, if you don't care about this, I'd recommend having a look at delicious.com or Google Bookmarks.

Another way to get your bookmark stuff organized and synchronized between browsers is the use of tools, made for this specific task. In an quite old article "25+ Ways To Synchronize Your Bookmarks" over at mashable.com you'll find many of them listed and explained. And lately the maker of browser have begun to integrate synchronization support directly into their browsers, for example Firefox Sync or Google's sync functionality in Chrome, which is great if you're using the same browser everywhere.

Personally I have chosen another tool to organize my bookmarks. Since I am running my own website with database support, I am in the fortunate position to host my own online bookmarking services. In my case I'm using the not so well known tool Online-Bookmarks by Stefan Frech, which is quite excellent for this task.

Unfortunately development of “Online-Bookmarks” has been put on ice a while ago. Nevertheless, all the functionality you expect from such a tool (except for tagging) is available and works flawlessly. And if you, like me, are used to work with an hierarchical organization of your bookmarks (i.e. keeping them in folders and subfolders) rather than tagging them, there's nothing you'll be missing.

So, if you have the necessary prerequisites and want to keep your bookmarks private, yet not giving up the advantages of an online bookmark service, you should check it out. And if you like it, drop the author an email to let him know. Maybe it encourages him to continue development on this nice project.

And just in case you wonder: I've currently 2228 bookmarks in my database :-)

I just upgraded this site to the latest Habari version. Yet again, it went quite smoothly and has shown no issues thus far. Nevertheless, please let me know if you experience any issues while surfing theblackzone.net.