Most SharingLinks users tell me they really like the thumbnail preview that appears when you hover over a bookmark. But a few have told me it drives them CRAZY! Not wanting to harm anyone’s mental health, we have now made this feature optional. So those of you who don’t like it, can simply edit your profile, and turn these previews off.

Another change I have wanted for awhile was opening the bookmarks in a new window. When I am using SharingLinks to research new topics, I invariably want to go back to the site for more goodies. So we have changed the default behavior to open bookmarks in a new window. But we also made this configurable,so each of you can choose your own default: new window or same window.

Both of the options are found by going to your My Bookmarks page, then looking in the right-hand column for “Edit My Profile.” If you make no changes, the default will be to display thumbnail previews and to open bookmarks in a new window.

Like these new features? Let me know.

After fixing a round of problems, www.SharingLinks.com has been very stable and growing nicely. And for that I want to thank those of you who have invested your time in adding bookmarks. I think it all has been worthwhile when you look at the wonderful collection of educational bookmarks we’ve created!

The next step I want to take with the site is to open the beta test to those invited by you (our existing members.) This will help in a couple of ways. First, it will add volume slowly, so we can continue to monitor server performance. And second, it will increase our reach in the educational community, while keeping our profile low to spammers.

Before doing that, I want to find out what you think about SharingLinks.com, how you use it, and what we can do to improve it.

Will you take a few minutes to complete this survey?

Thank you!

SharingLinks.com is back up (after being taken down on Saturday) and it appears to be quite zippy. I am still holding my breath, waiting to see how it goes for a few more days, though.

There are a lot of new undocumented features, too. After the programmers give me the go-ahead, I will produce some documentation to introduce the new features.

And then, we will go ahead with an invitation system to add “controlled growth” to the algorithm.

This is the first time we’ve taken Sharing Links down for maintenance during the beta period. I hated to do it, but there is some code that needs to be rewritten .. and the site just wasn’t playing nicely with others (meaning its performance was affecting all my other sites.)

So .. when we get these pesky problems taken care of, we can continue to focus on adding functionality .. and then expanding our beta test to MORE USERS.

The programmers have warned me though, that they do not want me to open the flood gates to the public. So I am thinking we will add users via an invitation system. All our existing users will get invites that they can pass around. That way we can grow in a controlled manner, as the programmers watch the system performance.

Maybe I’ll give each existing user ten invites. What do you think? Like the idea?