I can hez organizeyshun?

July 9, 2009 8:36 AM

Help me find a website/software for making lists about interests like music, movies, books, etc.

I make lists about things that I am interested in, kinda like to-check-out lists for movies, music, books, etc but at the moment I am quite disorganized about it. For movies I use imdb, for music I bookmark whole bunch of artist pages from allmusic.com, for books I use amazon's wishlist, and for games I keep a simple text file with the list within. As you can see, this is quite annoying to keep track of, and I'd like to use a centralized location that will work with most if not all interests. It could be a software, or it could be a website, I really don't care. I've tried listal.com and that seems like an answer to what I need, but the site is too clunky and a facebook/myspace wannabe, and I really don't need all those features.

Do you know what could I use?

posted by GrooveStix to technology (5 comments total)

Well, I have two LibraryThing accounts. One is for books I haven't read yet, and I like it because I can tag them based on where I heard about them or their subject matter. Makes it easy to look stuff up months after I read a review or something. Software-wise, I dunno. I would think a text file or spreadsheet would work, no?

(Unless your question was "what is some software I can use to amalgamate all these different things I want to keep track of."
posted by scratch at 8:45 AM on July 9

You could do this with Evernote. You could either keep all your lists as separate notes (e.g. "Books to read," "Movies to see,") or you could use the screenshot functionality and take a shot of each thing, adding in it's URL and a tag (e.g. "books," "movies").

Evernote has clients for the web, Windows, OS X, iPhone/iPod touch, and other mobile devices. It's very good and the free account is still all I need.
posted by wheat at 8:50 AM on July 9

Evernote is good. If you're a little bit technical, especially with web skills, you might be interested in OPML, a simple programming language designed for keeping lists like this. There are tons of OPML editors and tools out there but I always liked this one by Netcrucible because it's small and simple and elegant. It's basically a little web page that can sit on your desktop that lets you create and organize the list by clicking and dragging and dropping and provides a way to expand and collapse different sections to make viewing easier. Internet Explorer only, unfortunately, because it was made many years ago now pre-FF1.0 when IE handled XML better than Mozilla in a number of ways.
posted by XMLicious at 9:23 AM on July 9

Listography is excellent - very clean and simple.
posted by punchdrunkhistory at 9:28 AM on July 9 [2 favorites]

Ahhh Listography seems like exactly what I was looking for - easy, simple, and customizable in a wiki fashion! Plus it's private - it's perfect! :D
Thank you so much for the info!!!!!!
posted by GrooveStix at 11:46 AM on July 9