Now you can share any Listible’s list on your web site and blog. A feature called “Javascript Sharing Syndication” (JSS) has been implemented. When you find a list in Listible that you think it is useful to your web site visitors, you can include a small snippet of javascript into any of your web page (including Wordpress as I have tested), and the list will automagically displays on your web page. Pretty handy.

For instance, if you want to include the popular list - “Best Firefox Extensions for Power Users“, include this javascript snippet onto your page:
<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="http://www.listible.com/js/list/the-life-hack-community"></script>

You can get specific JSS snippet from the link Add This List to Your Site for Free on every list. Enjoy!

Content is all the matter

Why do people use software in the first place? To manage their content.
Why do people use web services in the first place? To manage and receive content in a well presented form.

Web2.0 begins when software companies such as Google (now Microsoft and many other software companies) understandb when the software become commodities, value moves up the stack to services, and the only matter is how and what data they used and interpreted.

Do you see how Google’s software are all focus on gathering data? Some of them are pretty extreme, because they are trying to sprint across the finishing line.

At Listible, content (the resources) is all its matter. The services provided by us are just a platform for you all to organise your data in a well presented form. On top of it, you can share and collaborate your data with other people. The goal is to share the knowledge and resources.

Do you want to know more about Listible from other people around the web? We have selected some samples for you in our new section. Have you reviewed or commented about Listible? Let us know.

A new feature, remember me has been implemented. Now, you do not need to re-login everytime you open Listible. So next time when you are in the login page, tick the remember me checkbox. Enjoy!

After midnight on Saturday, we will bring down Listible for a brief moment to complete the upgrade of the symfony framework. The code has been migrated from older to new API in our test environment, so the remaining steps are to move across the changes from our svn branch back to trunk, upgrade the symfony framework in the production server, and finally checkout the new code. It should not take more than 1 hour. We will update this post if anything odd comes up.

UPDATE (1:45am EST): Migration is started.
UPDATE (1:55am EST): Migration is completed. The service has been resumed.

Do not reinvent the wheel

Worse thing that you have done for development an application is reinventing the wheel. Initially when I thought of the idea of Listible - I have contacted several contractors and outsource companies to develop this list system. Many contractors told me that they will create their own code - from RSS feed handling, general database handling, to AJAX. I asked them, can they use any framework or any existing libraries? They said they will do better job then those existing frameworks.

I ditched the idea of getting contractor on this project (at least for now) and start this project on my own because they cannot meet our requirements. Or simply put, I do not agree with their mindset. I know that the more code that we bare on our side, it will be worse when we come to a time when performing maintenance and bug fixing.

Long story short, I finally chose symfony framework and its example as the base for Listible - Simply for three reasons. 1. I do not need to redo some basic Web2.0 supports, such as raw Ajax and RSS handling. 2. PHP is a very common language among web developers community and I can source developers easily. If there are features that the framework lacks, I can always contribute back to the framework upstream. 3. Symfony is an excellent framework and I trust symfony can and will be one of the leading frameworks on top of PHP.

Also, I am really interested and enlighted on how Fabien and the team use different ways to attract developer to use symfony - especially the level of the documentation compared to other frameworks. This is an off-topic for this post, so I will touch more on that later.

Hi I’m Jason and I’ll be contributing to the listible blog from time to time. While Leon covers technical topics I wouldn’t touch with a barge-pole, I’ll be spouting off from a user’s perspective as I’m quite unashamedly a bit of a listible fanboy.

Listible clearly has some close relatives in the Web 2.0 sphere but a key element that differentiates the site from its cousins is ”resources”. With the constant addition of resources to existing lists the site is expanding in all directions. This gives the site more than just a single focus point. Not only do we return time and time again to see which lists are popular enough to hit the front page, we also find ourselves returning to our favourite lists to see how they’ve grown.

The hardest part for me now is keeping track of all of my favourite lists! It was much easier in the “old days” of social bookmarking when I only had to watch the homepage of a site to see all I needed to.

In a very short time listible has become a valuable source of information covering many topics and interests. In my day job as a web designer I’m finding myself regularly returning to listible to check the growing resources in lists like:

• Best Web Design Resources

• Online References for Usability and Accessibility in Web Design

• Color Scheme Generators and Resources

After hours I’m a musician and I regularly tap into lists like:

• Best Guitar sites

• Best “Music Recommender” Websites

• Sites to download free (and legal) mp3

• Online Music Storage and Sharing

Anyway, that’s enough chatter from me, I have some lists to check on.

We’re interested in how you use listible. What are your most watched lists?

Cheers folks,
Jason

Wendy Boswell at About.com’s has written a review on Listible:

One of my very favorite-est sites at the moment (and I think it’s probably going to turn into a long-term relationship) is Listible, basically a list of lists. Their tag line is “a quick way to get resources” and boy, they’re not kidding around… Here’s how Listible works: it’s a brilliant combination of tagging, voting, and listing. Tagging for organization, voting for relevancy, and listing for ranking purposes. Anyone can make a list, and anyone can add to that list (free registration required).

About.com’s Review

Listible used to display all time popular lists in the frontpage. This setup has advantages and disadvantages - Visitor could access the most popular lists easily, however this may not good for regular visitors as they come across those lists already, and the good lists may be buried from the all-time populars.

To promote more on the new lists, we have introduced a time factor to the algorithm. So there are certain lists that has enough votes and freshness before it displays in the frontpage. We have moved the all time popular lists (without any time factor) to a sub-page.

We will constantly tweak this to make it work better. Try this feature and we hope you will like it.

Welcome to the Listible blog. Since this is a web 2.0 service, we will constantly introduce new features and fixes to the service. Make sure you have subscribed this blog’s feed, and listible’s latest feeds to receive latest updates.

Thanks for using Listible and remember to recommend this free service and content to your friends.

Regards, The Listible Team