Daily Archives: 2005-12-19

Actually, I think I’ll move to Scuttle

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OK, looks like I spoke a little bit soon… while de.lirio.us seemed like a good choice at the moment, there are a crapload of social bookmarking services to choose from! Barry’s paradox of choice strikes again :-/ Wikipedia links to a review of 19 bookmarking services, which can help you decide what to go with.

I’m setting an ideological filter and only considering open source options. I am also requiring the private bookmarks function, otherwise there’s no point in switching away from de.lirio.us. What does that leave me with? Scuttle, unalog, and Connotea (and of course de.lirio.us). That’s still too many options. Let’s consider which one makes it the easiest to import my bookmarks from del.icio.us. According to the chart, only Scuttle offers this feature. Sold! As soon as del.icio.us gets back up, I’m going to try using Scuttle’s web interface to import my bookmarks. As a bonus, it has a “friends list”-privacy feature, like Livejournal or Flickr, and it has… wait for it… comma-separated tags! That is one of the “features” of del.icio.us that I hate the most, the fact that you can’t have tags made from multiple words unless you mash them together somehow, tags are space-separated. Scuttle is just oh so superior, to both del.icio.us and de.lirio.us. Check out my Scuttle page.

If you’re worried that none of these webservices are trustworthy, I suggest you try Foxylicious, a Firefox extension that lets you back up your del.icio.us bookmarks into your browser. In fact, although this extension makes it easier to leave del.icio.us for another site, it also makes a compelling case for staying with del.icio.us. … No, no looking back! I am departing del.icio.us for the world of open source and privacy, and that’s final.

UPDATE: OK, not everything on Scuttle seems to work quite as reliably as one would hope, most notably my personal RSS feed. This is annoying, but I guess I’ll report the bug and hope someone fixes it. Personally, this experience is becoming a confirmation of Barry Schwartz’s theories. Choice is evil! It makes us unhappy with our current lot in life! Or something…

UPDATE to the UPDATE: I reported the bug on their Sourceforge project forum, and it was instantaneously fixed. Scuttle has a friendly, responsive developer community, which is always a joy to have with an open source project. It gives me the warm fuzzies and makes me want to stick around.

UPDATE^3: The del.icio.us transfer went perfectly! It even turned all the stupid underscores in my del.icio.us tags into spaces, which looks a lot nicer. I’m falling in love all over again.

Del.icio.us has too much downtime, I’m switching to de.lirio.us

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After an outage of multiple days, I’ve gotten sick of waiting for my del.icio.us account to return to normal so that I can post my bookmarks online. Therefore, I have I’ve switched to de.lirio.us, because (1) it’s currently operating, (2) it runs on completely open source software, and (3) it has this nifty “@private tag” feature, which allows you to hide certain bookmarks from the public eye. Del.icio.us lacks all 3 features.

If you know me, feature #2 is key. It means that I could theoretically run my own installation of the same software that runs de.lirio.us. It’s called Rubric, and it is released under the GPL. I’m not sure I have the expertise or server space to install it, but it’s the thought that counts.

The absence of feature #3 means that I’ve been putting my private bookmarks in my browser, where they are inaccessible from other computers and vulnerable to a hard drive crash. My private bookmarks include sites which I don’t want to show up in Google, surprises that I am planning for friends, and links which just aren’t relevant to outsiders (e.g. the directions to where I am going tonight). I’m sure you all have your own uses for private bookmarks…

At any rate, as soon as del.icio.us gets back up I’m going to try to run the Del2Del perl script to import my bookmarks from del.icio.us to de.lirio.us, and reduce my dependency on proprietary software.