Tag: bookmarks

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While looking up importers that I could use to move various third-party archives into something self-hosted, I found an add-on to pull Facebook posts into Keyring Social Importers, an extensible WordPress plugin. At the top of the list of built-in services: Delicious.

“Hey, I used to have a ton of stuff on Del.icio.us! I don’t know what percent of the links still work, but I should at least export it!”

delicious.com is gone, but I remembered they moved back to del.icio.us at some point, so I went there, and found…

The delicious site is temporarily offline while we move servers. We'll be back! Your bookmarks are safe and sound. The site should be available again on Monday, July 24.

Yeah, so I guess that’s not gonna happen. It turns out I exported my bookmarks in 2016 (into one big HTML file), which is probably as current as it needs to be.

The maintenance page mentioned Pinboard, so I looked up some articles. Apparently Pinboard bought Delicious in June 2017 and put it into read-only mode. I know I was able to look up bookmarks on Del.icio.us as recently as January, so it’s at least this July they’re talking about, but I’m guessing the server migration probably failed and it never came back.

The Fanfic Connection

In an interesting twist, I discovered that there’s a fanfic-related history in the past rivalry between Del.icio.us and Pinboard.

TL;DR: Delicious was once extensively used to categorize fic on LiveJournal, but an overhaul left it unsuitable. (Among other things, “/” became an unsearchable character, making it impossible to search for pairings.) There was a mass exodus of fanfic writers and readers, many of whom ended up at Pinboard…and Pinboard’s owner put in extra effort to address their needs.

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I use Firefox, Opera, and Safari on a regular basis on three computers at home (Windows, Mac, and Linux) and two at work (Windows and Linux). That’s 11 sets of bookmarks that I’d like to pare down to 2.

del.icio.us helps somewhat, especially since I discovered I can add it as a search in both Firefox and Opera, but web apps have a certain amount of delay that doesn’t work for the most frequently-accessed sites. And I don’t want to add yet another web app, I want to sync the bookmarks in each browser.

Most of the solutions I’ve found (.Mac, Google Browser Sync, Opera 9.5, various Firefox extensions) are geared toward syncing two or more copies of the same browser on different computers. What I want is to bookmark a site in Firefox on one computer, and have it show up in Safari on another.

Any suggestions?

Update: I have since discovered XMarks, which does exactly what I need on Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome and Safari (but not Opera, though I use it a lot less these days).

Update 2: XMarks eventually shut down. These days I use Floccus Bookmark Sync (my review).

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I finally got around to setting up convenient links to a couple of social bookmarking sites. At first I resisted the idea, figuring regular users probably have bookmarklets or extensions that take care of it. But social networking sites have casual users, too, and posting a few small icons is a subtler form of self-promotion than putting up a giant banner that says, “Hey! Submit this #$!@ story to ____ now!”

I ended up using Sociable, a plugin for WordPress that already knows the right link formats for several dozen such sites.

Of course, since Sociable provides links for so many sites, the obvious question becomes: Which sites do I include? I don’t want to post all 25—that would just be a jumble of icons, hardly usable (never mind aesthetic!)

I settled on five to start with:

  • del.icio.us is my online bookmark service of choice. I still manage a lot of bookmarks locally, but this lets me share a set between multiple browsers at home and work.
  • Digg seems to be the leading service for actually sharing and discussing links these days.
  • Fark wasn’t on my list at first, but then I realized that I make funny/weird posts here all the time. Some of them would fit right in.
  • Reddit is new to me, but it popped up a couple of times when I went looking through sites that I read.
  • Yahoo MyWeb I mainly added out of name recognition.

What social bookmarking sites (if any) do you use?