Tag: scuttle

on bookmarks

Season 3, Episode #19 of “Who gives a crap?” – the one where the guy moves bookmarks around

I’d installed a copy of Scuttle a couple of years ago, and have been happily saving bookmarks on my own server since then. But I got frustrated when stuff didn’t play as nicely with my stuff, when compared to delicious.com or diigo.com or the like. IFTTT scripts. Importers. Evernote import-bookmarks-into-a-note stuff. etc…

and, I guess, I realized that bookmarks just aren’t the kind of thing that I should care enough about having full control over their hosting and storage. they’re just bookmarks. dude. unclench.

so I tried going back to delicious.com. Brian and Alan are still using it, so it felt like home. But the importer utility is currently unavailable because spammers use it to crap their stuff into delicious.com. awesome. The support folks said they could manually import my bookmarks (which had been exported from my Scuttle install, thanks to a script found by the always awesome and helpful Scott Leslie). My bookmarks magically appeared a few days later. Awesome! Except the import treated all tags on a bookmark as a single tag, ignoring the spaces that were included in the bookmarks.html file. So “mooc whitepaper toread” was stored as a single tag, rather than as 3 separate tags. Doh. And as a result, I think, the delicious.com tagging tool became dog slow when tagging new bookmarks – loading 3000 unique-and-long tags to match for keystroke autocompletion…

then I tried diigo.com. I mean, George Siemens is using it, and a bunch of other folks. I created an account, fed it my bookmarks.html file, and BOOM. all of my bookmarks are there, going back to September 2004. And they’re properly tagged.

So, after a few days, I think I’ll stay there. For now, at least. I just decommissioned my Scuttle install.

Diigo isn’t perfect either, though. I get plenty of errors in the web interface (why they don’t trap server errors rather than barfing a generic 500 SERVER ERROR page is beyond me… reloading those pages 2 or 5 times seems to make the error go away). And the javascript-powered interface seems to timeout or fail silently – I still can’t add Chris Lott to my network for some reason. Strange.

So, for now, bookmarks are at diigo.com. Is this a failure or backtrack of Project Reclaim? I don’t think so. Bookmarks aren’t something I make, they’re just pointers to stuff. Who cares where they live, as long as the host isn’t doing evil things with the data (and what evil things could they really do? dunno. low risk.)

post-delicious.com hysteria

It [looks like](http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/16/is-yahoo-shutting-down-del-icio-us/) Yahoo! is going to kill/merge/mangle/whatever the delicious.com bookmarking service. Hysteria! Madness!

I’ve used Delicious for over 6 years. I’ve got 3,298 bookmarks stored there, with 16,669 tags. There’s a handy dandy [XML exporter](https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all) that let me grab them all in one file.

Then what? I could import easily to another third party service. But it’s likely that people will migrate to different services, so the network effects from Delicious are already evaporating. And any third party service will eventually die anyway.

So, I’ve [installed a copy](http://links.darcynorman.net) of the open source [Scuttle](http://scuttle.org) bookmark management app. I’ve already imported all of my old bookmarks (with notes, tags, and dates preserved) and will be using that instead of Delicious (or other options).

I had to chop the giant XML file into two smaller ones, as Scuttle only supports imports of 1MB, and my export file was 1.2MB huge.

The biggest thing I’ll miss is the Network on Delicious – seeing what people I care about are bookmarking – and the for:dnorman way of sharing links.

Scuttle has pervasive RSS, so if anyone wants to follow what I’m bookmarking (or just a tag’s items), it’s pretty easy [to subscribe](http://links.darcynorman.net/rss.php/dnorman).

It also supports the same for:username tag syntax, so I could happily tag things like [for:brlamb](http://links.darcynorman.net/tags.php/for%3Abrlamb) and if he’s subscribed to the [rss feed for that tag](http://links.darcynorman.net/rss.php/all/for%3Abrlamb), he’ll get the links. Same thing for any of the other 20 Delicious.com accounts I’ve sent stuff.

Also, because it supports the Delicious API, you can point other apps at it. And it has a REST interface, so it’s easy to integrate with apps that use URLs to connect. I’ve already reconfigured my RSS reader ([Fever˚](http://www.feedafever.com)) to send saved bookmarks to it rather than to Delicious.

Of course, with this running on my shared server space, it’s just another service I’ll come to rely on, which will drive me nuts when the server tanks…

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