The writing is on the wall for del.icio.us, so, as a preemptive move, I grabbed the 2,193 bookmarks I’ve put there since June 23, 2005. I’m reluctant to join the rush to Pinboard as a replacement, as the “issue” here is not Yahoo! but rather the entire notion of lazily outsourcing data management to companies with an ephemeral approach to infrastructure.
The “social” part of del.icio.us never really took off for me – Olle and Luisa were the only deliciousians that I leveraged the service with – so I’m considering simply importing my bookmarks to become, well, bookmarks, but inside the browser. Not sure with the performance implications for browser start-up and operation are on Firefox and Chrome, but a little experimenting should show whether there’s any down-side to this.
My next project is to consider whether outsourcing my photo management to Flickr, another Yahoo! property, is a wise move. It’s a worry I’ve had for a long time, one that flared during the discussions of a Microsoft takeover, and one I need to return to. In theory I should be able to cobble together a Drupal solution that does everything except replicate the “social” of Flickr (of which I have taken advantage), but even with innovations like CCK and Image Cache, Drupal image management is still an only partly-baked pie. But maybe I need to get into the kitchen.
Update: I’ve also been able to get my bookmarks as an XML file from https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all.
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Now that Dropbox enables me
Now that Dropbox enables me to see all my stuff on any computer the reason to keep bookmarks in their own special site rather than just keep my bookmarks file in my drop box goes away completely. And if Drop Box magically went away I’d still have everything and could move to another provider instantly.
If you import your bookmarks
If you import your bookmarks into Firefox and use Firefox Sync, they’ll automatically be available on any instance of Firefox you use, including mobile Firefox if you have Android or an N900, or Firefox Home app on iPhone.
It’s pretty sweet. It’ll sync your history, passwords, and open tabs as well.
Anyone know how to import del
Anyone know how to import del.icio.us bookmarks into Firefox with tags intact?
I’ve looking into the same
I’ve looking into the same tags issue, Rob; I’ll let you know what I find out. This tiny app purports to be able to help, but I haven’t tried it yet.
The issue I’m dealing with right now is deleting the 2,193 tag-less bookmarks I imported (before discovering that the tags wouldn’t import): in both Firefox 3 and 4 (for Mac) the browser crashes if I try to delete more than about 100 bookmarks at a time.
Update: the delicious to
Update: the delicious to Firefox site fails with a “We’ve been notified about this issue and we’ll take a look at it shortly.” error every time I try to use it.
The larger issue here seems
The larger issue here seems to be this: Firefox does its Backup and Restore of bookmarks (which does support tags) using a JSON-format file, but its Import and Export of bookmarks (which does not support tags) using an HTML-format file.
What the delicious to Firefox web app, and the Ruby it was based on, attempt to do is to take a “backup” of your Firefox bookmarks as JSON and merge it with a backup of your delicious bookmarks as HTML.
The relevant Bugzilla bug
The relevant Bugzilla bug report is here.
I’m giving the use Flock v2
I’m giving the use Flock v2 as middleware approach a try; gotta wait for it to import all my delicious bookmarks first, though, which seems to be taking a long time.
For me the social aspects of
For me the social aspects of Delicious have been quite useful (like finding new communities of people based on bookmarking the same things but using a completely different set of tags: differences in language point to different groups/communities).
However when teaching students on how to leverage the social net for their own professional development it was delicious they never saw a real value in, or expressed ‘not getting’.
The trade-off between control/ownership of data versus usefulness as objects of sociality in the cloud is always difficult. I keep my pictures stored locally as well as in Flickr, I keep my bookmarks in different places (that sync), likewise for other stuff.
I’m curious to see if a next step of ‘the cloud’ can be that we retain our own bookmarks/photos/data entirely but the aggregates like Flickr, delicious etc simply put it together from distributed sources.
I give up: all the available
I give up: all the available approaches to converting HTML-format del.icio.us export file into Firedox JSON-format restore file have failed, including the Ruby script and the using-Flock-as-intermediary. For the time-being I’ve setting on Pinboard.in as a stopgap: find my bookmarks here.
Based on this post at the
Based on this post at the Delicious blog I am going to tone down my panic level and stick with the service for now. I do, however, have a backup of my bookmarks and I have setup an Xmarks account for a holding area.
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