WebReference.com has kicked off a new series of tutorials today with this first part of their look at building a personalization system as a part of a bookmarking system.

In this tutorial we will build an online bookmark system. This will be used to create a database for storing all our URL's and their descriptions. There are many commercial and non-commercial applications that offer almost the exact functionality that we will create in our application; the difference is that we have full control over our application, allowing us to tweak it to suit our needs.

The application lets users login/logout, manage bookmarks, gives recommendations based on those bookmarks, show some news headlines and, most importantly, the user must be able to personalize their interface with a custom color scheme and image of their choosing.

This first part gets up to the point of creating the databases (a bookmarks and users tables) and creating the basic template wrapper for the entire site.