Database and Miscellany*

Keeeb says that your data belongs there. After installing the extension, Keeeb shows you a video of how to use their system. After trying to figure out Pinmark.it, this is an appreciated feature.

*Ease of use

I quickly found that if you’re selecting irregularly shaped text, it’s best to do the selection first, then click on the Keeeb button second.

Keeeb stored the text of the recipe perfectly.

I also tried to store the page as a bookmark, which also worked well.

Yes!

*Privacy/sharability and the granularity thereof

Sharing individual bookmarks is done via link. It’s not clear, but according the help site, you can invite others to collaborate on a topic.

Yes!

*Comments

Comments stored and shown on the Topic page.

Yes!

*Content storage - NOT a bookmarking service

When adding a bookmark, Keeeb stores some of the content. Not sure how this works all the time, but so far, it’s been good!

When adding a selection, that works well too.

Yes!

*How does it handle text?

Well. It actually seems to handle text well.

Yes!

Pinmark.it calls itself a home for your research, ideas, and stories. Sounds promising!

Content is organized in Categories.

Pinmark.it also says it’s optimized for group work and collaboration.

Ease of use

Install the extension/toolbar. It lives at the top of your screen.

Choose a topic to work on. Makes sense. You can create a new topic from the toolbar, and it becomes auto-selected.

Select an action. I tried the Text option, but after selecting text, nothing happened.

Image selection let me select part of the page, and it looked like it stored the data - I even got a “bookmark added successfully” notice. But when I went back to my collection of recipes, it was empty.

Cannot find a help link. Tried the Quickintro again, but it doesn’t really show how to use the toolbar - it just provides pictures of what the toolbar looks like.

I was finally able to add a note. But once it was there, on my topic page, I couldn’t figure out how to delete it.

Privacy/sharability and the granularity thereof

Collaboration is at the topic/board level.

Comments

Yep. You can comment, and the comment shows on the bookmark on your board.

Content storage - NOT a bookmarking service

Not sure.

How does it handle text?

Raindrop.io has, again, that single-page home that tells you nothing. It does, in all fairness, have a bottom bar with links to About, Tools, Help, Developers, etc.

It claims to recognize the type of content on a page, and store it appropriately for you. Raindrop also boasts fancy queries, sharing, rss feed subscription services, and a comfortable reading interface

After signing up, Raindrop gives you a brief tutorial. Collections contain bookmarks. Simple.

Ease of use

The extension does allow you to add a collection. After trying this out, it seems that you can’t add something to a collection immediately afterwards, though. My recipe got added to a default collection the first try. On the second try, it got it right.

Raindrop is a Russian project. If you forget to choose a Collection, you get an error message in Russian.

You can choose to save a url as a link, and article, a photo, or content.

Saving my recipe as an article stored a picture, and roughly 3 lines of text, with a link to the url it came from.

Saving my recipe as content did the exact same thing.

You can edit the content that’s stored, but it lacks convenience.

Privacy/sharability and the granularity thereof

Sharing is simple. It’s private, or it’s public. No other options.

Comments

None.

Content storage - NOT a bookmarking service

Hybridized, again. Stores even less content than Dragdis.

How does it handle text?

Dragdis has that style of home page that’s popular right now - a whole lot of promises, with no actual information.

Drag and drop anything, anywhere. A neat video that shows someone drag-and-dropping pictures and URLS. This doesn’t tell me what I need to know. It looks more image-focused, and again, I’m not looking for another Pinterest.

The organizational structure bears noting - Groups contain folders, folders contain clips.

Ease of use

Very slick interface. You can add folders to a group using their Chrome extension. I also like the way each item added to the board is represented by its own “icon.”

Recipe testing. I selected the text of the recipe, and dragged it to the newly created “Recipes” folder. Unfortunately, when I checked on my recipe, the extension seems to have cut off my recipe half-way down. Not so good.

To give it a fair shake, I also tried to store my recipe by dragging in the URL. The extension takes a picture of the top of the current screen (strangely enough, with the Dragdis extension toolbar showing), and stores it with a link back to the url.

Privacy/sharability and the granularity thereof

You can share a clip, or a folder, but not a group. Also, sharing is not done in such a way that the other person can contribute to your folder - it’s view only.

Comments

Good! You can comment on clips. I added a note to my recipe to add cinnamon, and Dragdis stored it nicely. There is no indication within the folder display that there are notes on a clip - you have to click to see that.

Content storage - NOT a bookmarking service

Dragdis seems to hybridize this. It only stores a portion of the webpage. That’s going to be an issue if someone’s site goes offline.

How does it handle text?

Scissorsfly.com (beta) promises to allow you to:

Clip pieces from the web

Organize your clips

Edit your own board

Share the world

Big promises. Let's see how it stacks up.

Ease of use

Not so good.

First of all, the Chrome extension does not allow you to add a new board. You have to do that at your Scissorsfly home page. Once you add a new board, it isn't visible on your home page, even though the count of boards goes up. To see your boards, you click on the "Organize" link on the top bar.

Well, how about adding content? I tried first with my recipe. Scissorsfly has a neat feature that lets you select a rectangle of the screen, which is great. But it didn't actually work. The little extension icon showed a spinning circle for 12 minutes before I restarted the browser. Nothing had been added to my board. A second try yielded the same results.

Based on this, Scissorsfly is not ready to come out of beta yet.

Privacy/sharability and the granularity thereof

Again, not so good. A board is private, or it is shared with the world. There is no way (that I could find) to share a board with a coworker or a best friend.

Comments

Not sure. Couldn't get this far.

Content storage - NOT a bookmarking service

If they get their service functioning correctly, Scissorsfly would probably pass this test. I think.

How does it handle text?

Springpad is leaving us. Soon (June 25, 2014, to be exact). And I’m looking for a replacement.

I liked Springpad. It was nice. But I really miss Clipboard. Clipboard was perfect. It did everything I wanted it to.

I’m going to be trying out, and documenting, my notes on various suggested replacements for Springpad/Clipboard over the next few days.

My criteria are simple. I will test each service for:

Ease of use

Privacy/sharability and the granularity thereof

Comments

Content storage - NOT a bookmarking service

How does it handle text?

That last one is really important. I’m not looking for Pinterest, here. I want to be able to store content from the web, then comment on it. This means text - sometimes full articles, sometimes portions of an article, or even maybe just a genius clip of code.

I’m going to test a few types of content. A recipe, which fits on one screen. A menu, which does not fit on one screen. That’s it - I’m keeping it simple.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man who identifies as a nerd/geek/gamer must be in want of female attention. This blog exposes fake nerd guys for the casual shams they are. Feel free to submit any relevant content.

Wait, don't go. I feel like I should explain. You should check out this awesome Tumblog - Fake Nerd Guys. Really, you should. It's a fantastic, tongue-in-cheek way of calling out some of the horrible, sexist things that men say about women, in a funny way - role reversal.

Go on, give it a try. Take a look at these geeky pieces of eye-candy, and think to yourself 'He has no interest in that character. He's only doing it for attention. Attention from some poor, lonely female geek. I should humiliate him. He needs to be put in his place. After all, he's just wasting his money on those skimpy little costumes.'

How does that feel? Kinda sleazy, right? Imagine living your whole life thinking this way? This type of hateful sexism is bad for the recipient, but we should not forget how fearful, alone, and angry the practitioner must feel. We must pity him.

We've already discussed normalization.  Now let's talk about denormalization.  In our example, you have a coworker, and he wants a report of people in the database, along with cities where they can be visited.  And he wants each person to have one, and only one, line of data on the output.

Of course you can accomplish this by manually cleaning up the data.  But what if this happens often.  Maybe your coworker visits one state per week, and you really need this automated, or you'll be manually cleaning up data every week.

You can use temp tables for this task, or you can use views, but either way, you can get this done in a much easier way.  The best way to show the output on one line per person is to have a table with one line per person.  How do you get there?  First, let's take a look at some sample data.

Table Name: person person_id first_name last_name gender 1 Elizabeth Smith F 2 Johnny Mason M

  Table Name: address address_id person_id city state active address_type 1 1 New York NY Y HOME 2 1 Flagstaff AZ Y SUMMER 3 1 Madison WI Y WINTER 4 2 Cleveland OH Y HOME 5 2 Portland OR Y BUSINESS 6 2 Cleveland OH Y BILLING

First we need to get a listing of all the cities each person lives in. The SQL for that will be:

SELECT person.person_id, city, state FROM person INNER JOIN address ON person.person_id = address.person_id WHERE active = "Y" GROUP BY person_id, city, state

That gives us the following output: person_id city state 1 Flagstaff AZ 1 Madison WI 1 New York NY 2 Cleveland OH 2 Portland OR

Notice that, although each person had three addresses, we've grouped each person's addresses by city and state. So, Johnny Mason only has two addresses in our output, while Elizabeth Smith has three.

What I really want to talk about is denormalization, but before I can do that, I think it's important to review normalization.

As defined at Wikipedia - Database normalization is the process of organizing the fields and tables of a relational database to minimize redundancy and dependency. Normalization usually involves dividing large tables into smaller (and less redundant) tables and defining relationships between them. The objective is to isolate data so that additions, deletions, and modifications of a field can be made in just one table and then propagated through the rest of the database via the defined relationships.

There is no doubt about it, normalization is good. Normalization means that you have a nice, clean database without duplication of data.

There's really not a lot more to say on this topic, but for the layperson, I'll elaborate.

Unnormalized database

An unnormalized database might contain one table for a person's information, and addresses, in one table.  Because a person normally only has one address, right?  But what happens when your person wants to have a different billing address, shipping address, and oh, by the way, the person also winters in Arizona.  Now you've got a problem.  This is where the normalized database comes in handy.

Normalized database

In a normalized database, you'll have one table for the person's basic information (name, gender, etc.)  Someone once described the information in the person table as "belly button" information - in other words, things a person only has one of.  Most important of all information is the id number that uniquely identifies the person.

The normalized database also has a table for addresses.  This table contains not only address information, but also the person's id number, and a unique id number for each address.  The addresses might also need date ranges, notes, and other information that help the user determine which address to use when.

Problems with normalization

Of course, this process just doesn't stop.  Normalization is never-ending, but it is positively a very worth-while process.  However, it wreaks havoc on reporting and output.

Pretend for an instance your coworker wants a report which shows all the cities where they might be able to visit the person.  And this coworker wants a really concise report - he does not want multiple lines of data per person.