I decided it would be nice to have a personal information management system where I can keep track of web bookmarks and other files in one system. I want to be able to tag resources and also group them by projects. I wanted it to be very simple and efficient to use, something like Google Bookmarks, but with the ability to keep files as well as bookmarks and a few other features.

I looked around for something that would do what I want and found a few things like 37signals Backpack, but nothing seemed to do exactly what I want, and I want to keep my data on my own server rather than someone else’s.

So I decided to roll my own. I’ve spent a bit of time on it now, and am reminded of the two key perils of programming: feature creep and perfectionism. There is always a temptation to add one more cute feature to make the system marginally better (at the expense of complexity). There is also the desire to have everything working perfectly under any kind of conditions. Both of these things make programming projects much bigger than they were initially.

To avoid these perils, I have to keep reminding myself that this is only for my personal use. I don’t want the costs to exceed the benefits …