17 March 2017 @ 11:02 am
Public Service Announcement: Delicious users, protect your bookmarks!  
Posted with [livejournal.com profile] kruel_angel's permission, and with apologies for the wall o' text:

The Delicious Bookmarking Service Is Dying

As many of you may have noticed, since Delicious was purchased and reverted to its terribly clunky format, Delicious's bookmarking service has become incredibly unstable, and often spends weeks at a time down. Tech support is 100% unresponsive, and their Facebook page hasn't been updated or responded to inquiries in about 9 months. What you may not have noticed is that they have disabled the ability for users to export their bookmarks. This means it's likely that tons of users bookmarks for thousands of fics are in danger of being lost forever unless something stops the site's current lurching, neglected spiral towards a total breakdown.

When I first entered the fandom, my gateway to tons of great fics came from users who had bookmarked them in Delicious. They are an incedibly precious resource and I have very strong panic attacks feels at the idea of them just vanishing at some point.

There Is An External Way To Backup Your Bookmarks

Right now del.icio.us is back up, and another Delicious user has figured out an external way to export your bookmarks. Over on Facebook, on the delicious page, user D.A. Gutierrez, (https://www.facebook.com/delicious/posts/10154393280717205) has figured out a workaround so people can download their bookmarks. He's offering to help export their links so they can back them up and/or import them to other bookmarking sites. I HIGHLY encourage folks to do this now, while they can.

Edit Your Tags Before You Export

Even whimpering its way toward an undeserved death, Delicious still has the most easy-to-use tag editing system. The one thing I discovered the hard way was that some bookmark systems interpret tags with spaces in them as separate tags. Which leads to a lot of grumpy editing with swearing, or at least it did on my part. Half an hour of checking your tags can save a lot of frustration later, unless you were smarter than me and did it the right way the first time.

Replacements For Delicious

As far as replacement services, there are two I found that most closely mirror what I loved about Delicious - Diigo and Pinboard. Each has pros and cons.

Diigo has a free level of service which is basically identical to Delicious, but allows for far fewer tags per post. So your bookmarks will be able to integrate seamlessly into Diigo but you lose ALL tags past the limited on each bookmark. The site is geared toward scientists and researchers, so you may feel a little weird letting your freak flag fly there, but... it's not bad. And the more folks who move over to it, the less weird it will feel.

Pinboard costs $11 a year and has its own quirks that are different from Delicious, so there is a pay barrier and some ramp-up time before you can get the hang of it. However, it allows for much more extensive tagging than Diigo, albeit with a much clunkier ability to change tags. For $25 it will also save a back-up copy of the bookmark page, which can be awesome, but... the backup engine is stymied by anything that has to be logged in for, so LJ entries and locked AO3 entries will not be backed-up properly, and links to masterposts will only give you a backup of the masterpost.

Ultimately, I went with Pinboard, but if you want to get a feel for the different flavors, you can check out my lists on all three services: Del.icio.us / Diigo / Pinboard.
 
 
( Post a new comment )
[identity profile] jpgr.livejournal.com on March 18th, 2017 05:38 pm (UTC)
I periodically saved my bookmarks to an Excel sheet. I added notes to mark crossovers and scenes to remind me what happens in each story so I can keep them straight. If someone has a huge amount, this won't help, but it's what I plan to do from now on
[identity profile] casey679.livejournal.com on March 19th, 2017 06:22 am (UTC)
That is... actually more obsessive than myself. I am impressed, and a little terrified, at your organization skills.
[identity profile] sammythankyou.livejournal.com on March 18th, 2017 06:38 pm (UTC)
I abandoned Delicious last year and tested both Diigo and Pinboard.

Diigo worked just fine until they updated the app and took away the ability to search other accounts (no network and no chance to find new fics). Pinboard is not free, but it's the only flaw I could find so far. I'm a 11 bucks user tho, I don't know anything about the 25 bucks service. We ended up moving to Pinboard the whole spn_littlebro archive too.
[identity profile] casey679.livejournal.com on March 19th, 2017 06:22 am (UTC)
Yeah, I left Delicious last year too, but I had hopes it would straighten back out. With their last few serious outages, it became clear that no help would be given, and I shuddered at the thought of all those Delicious bookmarks so carefully curated by folks vanishing forever.
[identity profile] sammythankyou.livejournal.com on March 19th, 2017 09:24 am (UTC)
I'm going through my old account and checking if everything got transferred all right (spoilers: it didn't), and there are a ton of other accounts that seem abandoned. I'm trying to save whatever fic I can to Pinboard and weed them out later, but it's a drop in the ocean.

I'm just sorry there's nothing like the migration tool thingy Ao3 is offering to archives. It's a big part of fandom, after all.
[identity profile] marlowe78.livejournal.com on March 25th, 2017 10:06 pm (UTC)
This has me shivering in fear... :-( I love my delicious-tags, and while I got a way of saving my bookmarks (a google-chrome add-on, easy to use but sadly really basic), it of course couldn't bring my notes with it. Also every tag has its own folder, so it's SAVE, just not good. *sigh*
[identity profile] isohatemyself.livejournal.com on March 28th, 2017 02:02 am (UTC)
This is why I stay detached and never grow to love anything. LOL
[identity profile] isohatemyself.livejournal.com on March 28th, 2017 02:01 am (UTC)
That's very kind of you!

... To be brutally honest, I'm like a neat freak organizer when it comes to school and work, but I couldn't give two shits about anything "fiction related". I know I sound like the worst fan ever because I've been nothing but flakey for the last ten years, but that's just how my cookie crumbles.

I've been wondering though what's the best site to save any kind of links? I like Pinterest, but I think it's best for pictures and videos.
[identity profile] casey679.livejournal.com on March 28th, 2017 08:25 am (UTC)
If you want to share them with others, Pinterest actually works great - my first introduction to it was through pinboards for things like the SPNkink-meme. There's a little ramp up to figure out how it works, but not bad at all.

If you just want to save them for yourself, check out Firefox's Pocket feature.
[identity profile] isohatemyself.livejournal.com on March 29th, 2017 12:21 am (UTC)
I will definitely have to check that out.

I really don't want to share my "fic related" stuff with other people seeing as I'm not really comfortable sharing this part of me with others for reasons that I'm sure you can imagine and vice versa, but I'd love to keep a secret little repertoire of my favorite stories in the fandom in a folder somewhere online. I'd also like to find a way to keep a mass-load of links to different sites and such 'repertoired' somewhere like this online, seeing as I read a helluva lot of articles online (I'm always online)... professional ones, some for fun, etc.

I'm like, crazy into the Internet and stuff.