I’ve been a contented user of the excellent (if unfortunately named) del.icio.us “social bookmarking” service; indeed saving bookmarks to del.icio.us has all but replaced keeping bookmarks in my browser.

But their technical problems recently, which included a long period of downtime, made me realize that relying on a third-party service to store my bookmarks left me too vulnerable to the whims of someone else: what good are bookmarks if you can’t visit them!

Additionally, del.icio.us was recently acquired by Yahoo! and that only added to my queasiness. Yahoo! may be in the geek karma sweet spot these days, but I’m not too keen on relying on them to shepherd my links.

The answer is bookmarks.ruk.ca (or bm.ruk.ca if you’re short on fingers and don’t mind the scatology), a implementation of the excellent PHP-based “del.icio.us clone” called Scuttle. Scuttle supports the del.icio.us API, so switching was as easy as a quick install, an export from del.icio.us, an import into Scuttle, and changing my pointers in the various clients I use the drink in del.icio.us data.

While I intend this primarily as a personal tool, you’re welcome to register your own account (free, easy, etc.) and use it to maintain your own bookmarks.

By the way, if you were subscribing to the old del.icio.us RSS feed, here’s the new RSS feed.