As an Internet user every day you visit certain online stuff as blogs, web pages, e-mails, pictures, video and so much more.  Part of these interesting pages, for one reason or another, you want to keep for further reading.

What can you do? You can keep them in the browser or somewhere online.  The saved web page is named a bookmark. To keep the bookmarks in the browser is not a bad idea BUT:

We are happy to announce the birth our site blog. This will be the place where we will show the process and history of creation, development and marketing of a totally new product as balastra is. Hope it will be fun! And you are encouraged to comment, give proposals or just stay informed.You can learn a lot about our goals and what we want to achieve. Hope that you will let us know if we succeeded. The blog is bilingual - in English (balastra.wordpress.com) and in Bulgarian (balastra.blog.bg).

We are happy to announce that first official beta version of balastra! As a first step we offer a personal place where you can store all your favorite bookmarks. You do not depend on your browser, personal and office computer, laptop, netbook, smartphone and whatever, any more. You just have to login the site and all your bookmarks will be here. Moreover, you can organize them in categories, add descriptions, search, define list of favorites and last but not least, have a mechanism for fast adding just by one click any currently viewed page.

Talking about concepts is good but somebody has to do the dirty work – programming and design. After short counting up it appeared this is going to be me .. again :)

As a first step I had to choose the development platform. That was the easiest part with the easiest answer – Joomla. Those of you carrying the burden of knowledge about web applications maybe know this Content Management System and how easy is working with it. The other good features are that it’s free and that it has a lot of additional extension modules, most of which are free too. Again, for those who are interested, the programming language is PHP and the database is MySQL.

Frankly speaking I was pissed off. I work with several computres – one at work, one laptop and a smartphone. Sometimes I go on a business trip with the business laptop, sometimes I access Interent using a public computer and many times I need saved links that I want to show to my friends when I am sitting at their computers.

I will not mention how many computers I changed during all these years. And what happened every time when I reinstalled one? Saving some files, then importing bookmarks, then wondering what I have saved and more importantly why. And this scenario many times during the years multiplied by the number of  computers, the number of the profiles and so on.

At one time I got really pissed off and decided to make a small program to keep all my bookmarks locally in my computer. In the next moment I knew it doesn’t make sense if it is not a site.