I truly believe that we are right in the middle of the second dot-com boom, with web apps popping up all over the place, competing to be more useful to you, so that you will in turn use them. If you read blogs like TechCrunch, Appscout, or Lifehacker, your inbox is probably flooded with profiles and reviews of new apps, all promising to be the solution for some problem or another.
The thing is, a lot of the time you see a cool application that you just can’t use right now, and won’t be using for quite a while. But what do you do if you eventually do need it? This happens to me often, when I look at apps such as Freshbooks for invoicing, or Icebrrg for web form creation. A lot of these apps are the perfect solution for a problem. The thing is, you don’t have that problem right now, but you want to keep them for reference.
For this I suggest keeping your own “directory” of these apps that you may want for future reference. They don’t all have to be web apps either. Any web page that you want to keep for future reference, you should bookmark it and put it into your little directory of solutions. A really good way to do this is to open a new del.icio.us account solely for the purpose of bookmarking things for future reference. Install the delicious firebox extension, and then create a tagging system so you can categorize webpage for easy retrieval.
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I currently have over 60 pages that I am keeping for future reference. Among them are sites such as Adobe Kuler, which is a color-scheme picking application. An amazing solution for color schemes, but I would still only use it the odd time when I needed a color scheme. Thus, I file it into delicious under “design”. To some, this may just be basic bookmarking. For me though, it is completely different. I have my browser bookmarks for quick access to frequently used web pages. I keep my swap file of web solutions separate, for anything and everything I think I might need in the future.
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