My understanding was that Ma.gnolia is a bookmarking service (like del.icio.us), they lost all the data and so Gandalfar lost all the bookmarks he was saving into it for years(?). The whole thing is extremely absurd because the only functionality of bookmarking services is to remember what you save to them, and they lost it all…

When I saw that, I got an simple idea. I liked it and was determined to try it at the first chance I get:

The whole fiasco with Magnolia would not happen, if the service would send emails with attachment to all their users weekly. Attachment would hold a gzipped file with all user’s data in some general format. So even if service goes to hell the users still have their data.

The important thing being: User would have his data and a choice to do with it whatever he wants!

With this you effectively create another backup system for your service. The one that is not in any way centralized and works on the level of peers / users.

I will use this technique with cebelca.biz , a very lightweight business web-application that we are finishing. The data dumps will also be encrypted with user’s passwords in this case.

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You can use it to collaborate with others on a text or note something down for yourself. Besides that QwikiTXT has two special features, it remembers 10 previous versions of the text and it can visually show the changes between the versions. Both of these features are generally nice to have, but come specially handy when collaboration on text with others.

Here is a simple screen cast to quickly show the QwikiTXT work flow:

www.site-assistant.com

Few examples of what site assistant does:

- It checks your web-site’s front page and displays most important information to you (like Title, Meta tags, Pageload time, Advertisements on the page, Statistics you use)

- It checks your domains who-is record and show systematic information about it like (Date of expiration, Last update, Registrar, Age of domain…)

- It checks external sources (like Google, Yahoo, DMOZ, Alexa..) and reports you number summary of relevant information (like indexed pages, back-links, page rank, Alexa position, google safe-browsing warnings…) and links to pages with detailed view

- It lists external links and external sources on your website front page, it warns about known patterns of hacking attempts, spam related words, errors…

- A simple to use notebook to write down tasks, ideas or messages for others on per website basis.

Public beta offer

Site Assistant is currently in public beta and if you sign up you get to manage up to 30 websites for 1 year for free of charge.

I hope you will find our posts interesting.  Let’s get started and see what happens.

Janko