This is the homepage for my bookmark maintainer, TagIt. TagIt is similar to your web browser's bookmark list but with a twist: it will tell you when a bookmark's contents have changed.
TagIt is a Java application, so you need to have some way of running Java 1.2.x programs. TagIt uses both Swing and weak references, so you need to use Java 1.2.x. You can get more information about Java, including everything you need to run TagIt, at http://java.sun.com.
If you just want to run TagIt you should download only the jar file. Or, you can get the source code instead, and compile it yourself. If you make any modifications or improvements please let me know about it. The source code is distributed as a tarred and gziped file. It is licensed under the GNU Public License.
If you’ve installed the Java Development Kit from Sun you can start up TagIt with the very simple command line:
Java -jar TagIt.jar <Bookmark file>
Where <Bookmark file> is an optional bookmark file.
Once you have started TagIt you should see a menu bar with a blank window underneath. Under Microsoft Windows it should look something like this:
Your image may be different if you are using a different (well, superior) operating system.
Hopefully all of the menu items will be self-explanatory. However, there are a few features that you can not access from the menu.
You can rearrange the bookmarks by dragging them with the mouse. The bookmark’s new location will be shown with a dark horizontal line extending across TagIt’s window. If you drag the bookmark to the right side of the window the horizontal line will become gray, shift slightly to the right, and the bookmark will be made a child of the bookmark above it.
You can create a new bookmark by dragging it from your web browser into TagIt’s main window.
The user interface could use a little more work; it would be nice if bookmarks were checked in their own thread; even providing a progress bar would be an improvement.
The save panel will not warn you before overwriting a file.
Normally TagIt stores a web page's "last modified" date. To determine if a web page has changed TagIt compares the stored modification date with the page's current modification date. However, some web pages don't provide a "last modified" date. For these pages TagIt creates a message digest for the page. It then stores the message digest instead of the modification date.
A message digest is a way of representing a complete object, like a web page, with a small checksum. The web page can't change without changing its message digest, and the message digest is easy to store. Unfortunately, the entire web page has to be read to compute its message digest.
But even this solution won't always work. Some pages contain dynamic information that you don't care about. For example, a page might display the latest stock quote for a company. TagIt doesn't know that it should ignore the quote section and will think that the page has changed. You can envision all sorts of schemes for filtering the uninteresting portions of a web page, but it's a pretty open ended project.
Last Changed January 10, 2000.