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Snippets are a standard way to share small fragments of information through the world wide web. I created my Snippets because of a long standing interest in "personal information management" and because of my admiration for the ideas and ideals of information pioneers like Vannevar Bush, Tim Berners-Lee, and Ted Nelson.
Snippets differ from most web based information sharing by their structure, narrow scope, and reliance on web-based indexing engines. Snippets are small fragments of information -- typically information acquired through personal experience (perhaps painful personal experience). Snippets are more structured than typical web pages; they specify the domain covered, language used, confidence in the information, and other parameters (see Structure of a Snippet, below). Snippets use standard HTML and logical markup, and are designed to be easily interpreted by Lynx browsers and screen readers. Snippets avoid tables and images unless necessary. Since snippets are intended to be "terminal" sources of limited information, they do not usually contain links to other information.
Unlike most web pages, Snippets are not organized by topic. I do provide a snippets "table of contents", but Snippets are intended to be located through a search engine, such as Alta Vista, HotBot, or InfoSeek. (These are the three I register my Snippets directory with.)
I see Snippets as a shortcut to "everyday wisdom". How did I get my dog's teeth clean? What's an IRA rollover, and how should one use it? What's an easy way to dollar cost average a pension investment? Where can one RollerBlade in winter in the twin cities? What sorts of things did I learn when installing a new roof on our house?
Anyone can produce Snippets. You can use the same structure I use, or make up your own. The table below shows the fields I use. If you view source for a Snippet you will see how this looks in HTML.
| Structure of a Snippet | |
|---|---|
| Field Name | Values, type |
| Title | Title of Snippet with (snippet) at end. |
| Description | Short description. Will be used by indexing engines. |
| Content | Actual content of Snippet |
| Author | Name of author of snippet. |
| Language | Language snippet is written in. english |
| Keywords | Terms to guide indexing engines. teeth, dog, canine |
| Topic | A major topic area for snippet. commerce, computer, education, etc. |
| Subtopic | A sublevel below topic. index, Macintosh, organization, etc |
| Domain | What is domain where snippet is relevant? .us, .world, etc |
| Confidence | How confident is author about information? 1-3, 1 is moderately sure, 3 is very sure. |
| Creation Date | |
| Last Revised Date | |
| Expiration Date | Date after which information is not relevant. |
Since Snippets are so structured, I produce and store mine in a flat file database. I use FileMaker Pro for my snippets.fp3 database. If you use FileMaker, feel free to download a zipped copy of my database. Click here to start downloading snippets.zip. (30K, StuffitExpander/Mac will unzip files on the Mac.)
Please let me know what you think of Snippets, and send me ideas and suggestions. Thanks!