I follow Duncan’s Jotter largely because Duncan Smeed often points to tools and web sites that I’ve never heard of that are, nonetheless, simply amazing — and in this latest case, indispensable.
Last week, Duncan pointed to Single File, and this weekend I signed up for a year’s subscription to the service. Single File only does one thing but it does that one thing brilliantly — it allows people to track their book collections.
Now if you have a small book collection of just a few hundred items, the product might be overkill. But when you get past about a thousand books, keeping track of them is a real pain. On a number of occasions I have started to catalog and organize my book collection, but usually give up after a brief burst of energy. So far I’ve managed to enter several hundred books into Single File in just a few hours of effort over the weekend.
Of course, eventually I will want to do what Duncan hints at, and bring my book collection database into Conversant, and Single File makes that as easy as it can on its end by allowing me to export my data to delimited files that can be imported by other applications. Using Single File does not lock the user in to using it forever.
All-in-all, Single File is exactly what I look for in web-based applications. Simple, straightforward and concentrates on doing one job incredibly well.