A few ideas, quick ways to get on the Bookie contrib list

Ideas!

Well, with all the great stuff going on with Bookie, I’ve gotten a bit buried in some big changes. The background processing and importing updates are going to take a bit to get right.

This means, there’s a great chance for others to hack up the little tweaks that we need to really add some polish to Bookie. So below I’ve listed a few ideas that should be pretty simple things to add, but with a really good positive and visible effect on the site.

• Add notification that user has invites

  Now that invites are there, we should highlight a user’s account navigation link to let them know they have invites available. I’ll periodically add them to the system, and we don’t want users to have to go to their account page each time to see they’ve got invites. I think a simple adding of one of the envelope/message type icons from our font-icon set would be perfect, with some sort of hover message to start. We might also want to highlight the block in their account page so it stands out that the invites are available.

• Flash message system.

  We want to be able to let users know things have happened successfully after doing something that redirected them. Imports are going to be doing this, saving/updating bookmarks, etc. It’d be nice to have a consistent type of ui to drop flash messages in and them to show after a redirect.

• Show new user message if self bookmarks page has no results

  When a new users starts up and logs in, they default to their own page of bookmarks…which is going to be empty. So we should detect this in our JS code that fetches the results and displays a set of default content with links to things like importing instructions, where to get the chrome extensions, and other handy new user tips.

  Some of this might also be nice to use for the email that a new user gets when they’ve been invited to Bookie.

• Add firefox bookmark importer

  Ok, so this one is a bit more involved, but really, it’s a single class and a couple of Python methods. The hard part is reading in and figuring out how to match bookmarks to tags in Firefox’s JSON dump of bookmarks. Once we get the Firefox extension rolling, it’ll be great to have a good import system for the browser as well.

Well, here are four things I’d love to see happen in the near future to help make the experience a level nicer for everyone. If you’re interested in all or have any questions, ping me in #bookie in irc or shoot me a comment below. I’d be happy to help walk anyone through these or any other ideas you might have.