Welcome & Whatis

Hello and welcome to the homepage of cutemarks! You can find here all information what CuteMarks is, news about releases, bugs and fixes and necessary docs to run CuteMarks.

"What the heck is CuteMarks?"

It started January 2002 when I wanted to make my roughly 400 bookmark collection, linking to special sites in the financial industry dealing with derivatives etc., accessible to friends and business partners. But this - hey e're IT guys ,-)) - should be done more in an interactive web application rather than in a static copy of the collection I'd likely had to . Of course I wanted also to have some cool tool to change and edit it online on the web server, as I didn't want to maintain a local and a web repository in parallel.

After reviewing several bookmark packages that would suit this purpose I had to refine my requirements:

• Almost every second package required JavaScript to run. As a travelling consultant I don't have JS anywhere available as this is mostly prohibited by the security policy of the companies where I have to work at. Same applies to cookies. So I had to dump those packages.
• Other packets involved lots of graphics to indicate different levels, leaf nodes and so on. This involves too much data transfer, having too long loading times when on the road and just being equipped with a modem on the laptop. I wanted to have something small, sleek which didn't look like a cartoon just when trying to find some bookmarks. So I had to dump those packages.
• Two packages have been left over. One was filesystem based and awfully slow when it came to more the 200-300 bookmarks. Another one was just too simple to serve my needs. So I had to...guess what ,-))

Finally I had to refine my personal requirements to the bookmark server to the following:

• Public accessible read-only view with public read/write view to bookmarks
• No graphics at all, text will do it.
• No Javascript, no java, no cookies, just plain HTML - and some customisation possibility with css for the layout.
• Some sripting on the server side of course.
• Providing a possiblity to use the bookmarks even on small display devices like palmtops or mobile (WAP).
• Storing the data in a database, as I consider this always a good reason. You usually get a good to excellent performance advantage in comparison to a file based datastorage. And you can usually backup and restore everything very easy.
• Of course this should run in a Linux environment ,-))
• Well, replace "Some scripting" with PHP and "database" with MySQL and you have..."CuteMarks". You may call it also YABS "yet-another-bookmark-server" (compared to the already 20+ packages I reviewed) because that's what CuteMarks is...but it has some tiny little features others don't have and what makes it really...cute <gg>.

You can have a look at the public version of "Sören's financial bookmark collection" at http://all-about-shift.com/sfbc/ to see it in action.