Listphilia

We’ve had the ability to use HTML on your lists for a while now. This seemed a reasonable format since a lot of people know HTML and any WYSIWYG editor we may add should work in this mode. But, HTML isn’t very friendly. Paragraph formatting and special characters need too much attention. We fixed this by changing the rules of HTML just a little. Since we needed to filter certain tags we had already started down that road.

Listphile’s HTML rules:

Supported tags: a, br, hr, p, tt, b, i, sub, sup, pre, blockquote, q, em, strong, dfn, code, samp, kbd, var, cite, abbr, acronym, dl, dt, dd, ul, ol, li. You must use close tags. For example, HTML allows “<ul><li>one <li>two</ul>” but Listphile requires “<ul><li>one</li> <li>two</li></ul>”.

Don’t escape special characters. The correct HTML for “Jack & Jill > Hill” is “Jack & Jill > Hill”. On Listphile, just use “Jack & Jill > Hill” and Listphile will do the right thing. The &, <, and > tags are available if you need them.

Listphile will turn linefeeds into paragraph structure. You don’t need to wrap paragraphs in <p></p> tags. Just leave a blank line, by pressing return twice, to separate your paragraphs. A single linefeed (pressing return once) will be converted to a <br>. If you prefer manual control, just wrap everything in <p> tags the way you want and we won’t process your linefeeds.

There are three places you can use rich text. The list description, item comments, and any multi-line text field such as the item description. Have fun.

Embedding is now enabled on Listphile. What this means is that any list, atlas or database on Listphile can now be embedded on any website. This is really cool because it greatly expands your reach when you create a list.

Imagine spending the time to put together the beginnings of a helpful resource, and then let people share and distribute it across the web by inserting it into their sites. Everyone still comes back to a central place to made adds and edits (Listphile), but suddenly your list is portable and has a very wide potential reach. This will encourage collaboration, and get your list/atlas/database under more peoples’ noses. Here’s the Open Surf Atlas:

It’s a pretty simple affair: in the right margin of the main page for every list on Listphile, you will see an area that contains the embed code. It’s just like YouTube. Grab the code snippet, and paste it into your blog or website.

One big caveat: this will not work on blogs that are hosted on someone else’s server (i.e. listphile.wordpress.com, blogname.blogger.com, blogname.blogspot.com, etc.) because these hosted blog sites sanitize this kind of code. If you control your server, however, or have your own website, this should not be an issue.

This first release is pretty cool, however we hope to add lots of helpful controls that will allow you to change height, width, colors, font sizes and colors, layout, etc. For now, the embedded list will display as map, list or thumbnails depending on the default setting for that list. And if you feel like peeking under the hood, you can actually control a lot more by tinkering with the parameters in the embed code (height, width, rows, border). Enjoy, and as always, please send us feedback.

A little while ago, I started thinking about the world around me — the world of nature, of human accomplishments, history, people, places, products, philosophy, geology, biology — from the point of view of Lists. Kinda simple, now that I actually write it down this way. I find that making lists are a really useful way for me to learn. And I thought to myself, “Why not make a website that enables people to make lists together?” Of course, the specifics have changed and gotten more complex (as they always do), but my hope is that people see the big vision here: Listphile can be used to share and collaborate around knowledge. The Open Surf Atlas on Listphile is the first baby step at creating something on the Listphile platform that a) has lasting value to people who use it, and b) is built by a community of users in an open way.

I guess I should say at this point that my definition of a list is a pretty broad one. As a matter of fact, some people might accuse me of cloaking my wolf (a database) in a sheep’s clothing (a list). To be honest, it doesn’t really matter to me, as long as people see the potential of Listphile. I call these things “lists” because I think it’s a non-intimidating way to capture peoples’ interest. The fact that it’s a flexible tool with an open data model blah blah blah can be discovered later, by those who care to dig deeper, who want to customize, who are listing stuff that needs more organizational shaping, granularity. But I digress.

Anyways, I realized that there’s a lot to be garnered, and many fascinating connections to be made, when we use lists to help us organize and understand information. And if we take the power of the internet, mix in the coolness of open APIs and mashup culture, dip into the power of the participatory web, and marry it with this list concept, we can have something that’s pretty cool and useful. That’s how Listphile was born.

My guiding principle in creating this site, this tool, has been my curiosity. I really enjoy using Listphile, as evidenced by my list-interest in surf spots, oysters, Frank Gehry, Yoda (and lots more) and I really hope that other people will be struck by the same curiosity, and the same desire to contribute, to make their mark, to learn, and to look at their reality, at least for a short time, within the framework of a list.

Without further ado, we humbly offer up to you as the first version of our beta product. Please send us feedback or get in touch with us if you have something to say or you’d like to get to know us. Oh, and by the way, “us” is three guys working out of our respective garages and cafes