What a great way to start 2008 with Surfulater included in 10 slick and cool IE extensions by By John Fontana, Network World, 01/04/08. We certainly are in good company along side Microsoft Silverlight. Click on Next in the article to get to slide 2 and you’ll see:
Surfulater
What it is: Sure there’s lots of information on the Web, but sometimes you just want to keep those little nuggets you find on your system for safe keeping. Surfulater lets you permanently save selected text, images, and complete Web pages, then edit, annotate, cross-reference, organize, and search for information in your offline personal and portable knowledge base.    ÂWhy you should use it: Ever find a dead link in your Favorites folder? Or discover a piece of information has been moved onto the “subscription only” part of a Web site?
Where to get it: www.surfulater.com
Surfulater is indeed a great addition to IE, but of course it also works with Firefox and does much more than just make it easy to capture web content. But you most likely already know this.
I hope everyone had a safe and happy Xmas + New year break, we certainly did. I’m back at work in earnest now, after cutting back to a support only role over the break.
Tagging. Right now it looks like the next big new feature for Surfulater will be tagging. I’ve been thinking about this for quite some time and have locked down an initial design over the past week or so, which looks good, at least on paper.
I’ve re-read everyones posts on the forums, gone over the notes I’ve been taking for some time now and digested and distilled these into the initial design specification.
In order to deliver the proposed tagging system as well as other future capabilities, it looks like I’ll be replacing the fairly simple database engine Surfulater has successfully used to date with a far more powerful SQL Database engine. This will require code to convert your existing KB’s to the new database, as well as the new code for the tagging system, so it may turn into an even more substantial task than I had expected. That said the end result will be well worth it and put things firmly in place for even more interesting future developments.
As soon as I’ve got something to show you and talk more about I’ll post here on the blog.
PS. Thanks for all the great comments re. Web KB’s in my last blog post.
If you’re going to a SQL database, please use something we can hook into, and some documentation of the schema, so the developers out here can operate on the database. SQL Anywhere is supposed to be a superb administration-free database. Microsoft’s SQL Server Express is for free and is very capable.
Thanks for the tags (forthcoming)!
I’ve noticed more and more products coming out with support for SQLite, a transactional, public-domain SQL database.
http://www.sqlite.org/index.html
Thanks for a great product.
@Hoyt. I am planning to move to an embedded SQL database. Note though that all the text content you see in Surfulater is stored in XML (.Surfulater) files so it is already accessible. That won’t change with the use of an SQL DB.
@Ed. I looked seriously at SQLite when I designed Surfulater. Back then it was Version 2 and fell short of my requirements. A lot has changed with SQLite Version 3 and I’m currently seriously evaluating it. It is my number one candidate right now and is unlikely to be beaten. In fact I’m quite excited about the opportunities it presents.