No, actually this is what tye originally meant when he mentioned the personal nodelet should be changed. I was in a gee-whiz mode and put together the Personal Nodelet on different principles. PN is basically a list of tiny pm-html snippets that are manipulatable as such so you can reorder, limit the list etc. The Free Nodelet is just a single html string that doesn't go through normal PM tag filtering. I think the only real difference is that you have the controls on Personal Nodelet Settings and PN can display code tags, wheras the "Free Nodelet" is just what it says Free. :-)

In some respects when tye put this together I thought maybe I should remove the PN, but what you just said seems to make me think that on the contrary there is a place for both. I think that PN is more suited to link collecting, and the free nodelet to more stylized stuff so they seem to complement each other.

A big difference for me that you don't mention is that I adjust the Free Nodelet by pasting the contents into my favorite editor (or other tool), changing anything in any way I like, and then pasting the results back into User Settings. So I can do a global search/replace easily or I can write a tiny snippet of Perl code to sort a list of links in the middle of my free nodelet by node ID and paste the now-sorted list back in. That is more than just being free to add anything I want to it.

- tye        

They have different merits. The various Add to foo links on the PN make it nice for on-site bookmark management, whereas the FN’s unconstrained content makes it nice as a sort of cross between homenode and scratchpad that’s always available. (I know about FN templating, but really, the PN does much of the same out of the box, and I’m getting cranky in my old age and expecting more things to Just Work.)

Makeshifts last the longest.