I am your webcrawler

March 20, 2011 3:44 PM

I teach a bunch of photography courses, and at the end of the course I always try to hand out some useful links to online examples and tutorials. I'd like to set up a low-maintenance link dump for the material, but not sure how.

I don't need anything more fancy than a page with descriptions and links, and possibly a "report dead link" button and "added x days ago". Preferably, there's a backend for me to do some tagging and keeping track of when I put the link up and whatnot, but primarily I just want a big page full of links.

I can style the thing in CSS, but the less I have to muck about with code and tags the happier I'd be. I'd rather not go through a page like delicious or stumbleupon, unless there's a really good reason to. All suggestions appreciated.

posted by monocultured to computers & internet (7 answers total)

You could use Google Bookmarks, or any other bookmarking service, and make the collection public.
posted by COD at 3:58 PM on March 20, 2011 [1 favorite]

Here's what I did to link to all my photo galleries - made an html document in Kompozer (I'm on a mac) and put it in my Dropbox public folder. It's not attractive, but it's the best thing I can come up with at the moment. Very easy to maintain as the file is on my hard drive and is updated immediately whenever I make a change.
posted by kdern at 4:01 PM on March 20, 2011

Bit.ly does something they call "link bundling" that you might be interested in. If you go to the site and make a login, you can just paste all of your links in the box and create a "bundle". Then you can share just one link and the others will come with it. You can also see what links people are most interested in and maybe curate more of those in the future.

For example: Here is a bundle containing four random things I have linked recently. From that page your students can click through to any of the links that might interest them.
posted by milqman at 4:22 PM on March 20, 2011 [1 favorite]

how about using google sites? you can make a basic webpage (or more fancy if you have the inclination) and make it public or available to a select few.
its available from the more tab in gmail
posted by sparkle55 at 4:39 PM on March 20, 2011

Maybe tumblr? It's free, easy to customize the look, easy to update. Here's a quickly-thrown-together list of independent printing resources that seems similar to what you might want to do. I've got no affiliation with the site...just saw it recently.
posted by msbrauer at 4:50 PM on March 20, 2011

I have a soft spot for the look and function of kdern's solution, although the path of maintaining html documents is fraught with cursing and sadness. I guess I ought to embrace the Google, but really wish for something simpler… Still open for suggestions.

Tumblr might be a way to go, I hadn't seen anyone use it that way before. Thanks for that, msbrauer. That style looks plenty like indexhibit, and I already have one of those installed and find it somewhat useful.
posted by monocultured at 4:59 PM on March 20, 2011

multiurl is perfect for this.
posted by tomswift at 5:04 PM on March 20, 2011