My Etherpads - a bookmark service for Etherpads
Etherpad is a brilliant web based collaborative text editor service. You can create as many etherpads as you like, and use them to effectively collaborate on things like writing, keeping lists and swapping code snippets. With Interacting Arts, we have used the desktop app SubEthaEdit for collaborative writing workshops, and I was very impressed when Etherpad showed up. I use it daily for all kinds of projects.
The Etherpads are secret by obscurity - all etherpads are completely open and you can paste the link to anyone, but since the link ends in a password-like code it is hard for someone to guess their way to your specific Etherpad unless you sent the link. I often use Etherpads for discussion and collaboration on things that are not neccessarily super secret, but also not meant for the public eye. Todo-lists, discussions, ideas, text preparation. The fact that the Etherpad pages don’t have titles makes it hard to find previously visited etherpads by title or content in my web history, and since I don’t want to show them to the world, I have to bookmark them locally in my browser to keep track of them. These bookmarks are not accessible if I’m not on my own computer, and I can’t find the etherpad by search like I could with most other types of bookmarks if I didn’t have access to them.
These problems are all fixable by for example syncing local bookmarks via Dropbox, posting private bookmarks to delicous or keeping a named list of etherpads in a google doc. But then I wouldn’t get to write a nifty little web app on Google App Engine, would I? =) Presenting My Etherpads, a one page, super simple bookmark service for Etherpads. Sign in with your Google Account, and make a convenient list of Etherpads and what they are for. Bookmark that page, and you’re set.
The app took about 3 hours to come up with, design and build.
This is what the front page looks like:
