ratcreature: Tech-Voodoo: RatCreature waves a dead chicken over a computer. (voodoo)
Recently I often fail to add fanfic I've read to my Pinboard bookmarks, but still manage to click the bookmark button on AO3.

I feel like there ought to be some (semi-)automated way to get my AO3 bookmarks into a format that Pinboard could import. Ideal would be if canonical tags became Pinboard tags but not the Tumblr-style tags and it could recognize duplicate bookmarks already in my Pinboard.

Does anyone know of an AO3 add-on script or such that would harvest and reformat your bookmarks there into a bookmark file that then could be used by Pinboard? I can't be the only fan who'd find that useful.

grumble

Feb. 11th, 2015 11:30 pm
ratcreature: Woe! RatCreature feels emo. (woe!)
The recent trouble Pinboard is having (victim of DDOS attacks, I think based on its twitter?) is disrupting my fandom engagement, i.e. fic browsing and bookmarking, quite a bit. General web surfing too, because I use its private bookmark feature for most of my other bookmarking (recipes, art tutorials, whatever) too. People who target websites like that suck.

This also reminded me that once the site is stable again, I really ought to export my bookmarks. It's been a long time since I backed them up last.
ratcreature: Like a spork between the eyes. (spork)
Poll #8736 passive-aggressive tagging?
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 29


Starting to tag XMFC stories with a "bad German" tag where applicable, would be...

View Answers

petty.
7 (24.1%)

breaking fannish etiquette and shouldn't be done.
1 (3.4%)

pointless, because it isn't a good way to communicate the complaint as feedback to the author.
6 (20.7%)

a good way to vent frustration after multiple rants failed.
22 (75.9%)

useful information for the bookmark readers.
18 (62.1%)

So in summation, should I create a "badgerman" tag?

View Answers

Yes.
15 (60.0%)

No.
1 (4.0%)

I don't care.
4 (16.0%)

Make it a hidden tag that Pinboard offers just to vent for yourself.
5 (20.0%)

ratcreature: RatCreature is thinking: hmm...? (hmm...?)
Is there a decent bookmarklet or Firefox extension out there? The official one doesn't work well for me. I don't care so much that it only shows my tags up to C or so (it is somewhat impractical to show thousands after all), but the field for tags is too limited in length, i.e. when I wanted to add another tag to a WIP I had previously tagged the entry field didn't even show all tags that were already on the bookmark. I could add another tag by entering it more near the beginning of the field instead of at the end and it still shows on the site okay, but that is inconvenient.

ETA: I now found this tutorial for making custom buttons, and that made a bookmarking popup with scrollbars and the entry field seems to work better too.
ratcreature: RatCreature is so screwed... (screwed)
Like most other (now former) Delicious users I found the relaunch very upsetting to put it mildly. I won't rehash all the ways in which they broke the service, but it boils down to that now you can't use the site even for the most basic things, like accessing your own bookmarks in an efficient way. I gather that there might be some sort of technical reason for this mess due to Yahoo retaining ownership of some of the backend stuff, but I don't care. If they did not think to at least implement pagination links in the bookmark-by-tag display as essential, I won't hold out hope for them to fix this somewhere down the line. It is self-evident that if I had only ten links of a kind I would not need a service to organize them in the first place. That is not some kind of advanced or special interest use.

Anyway, I have too many tags for Diigo, both in total as well as per bookmark in many cases (not to mention their inconvenient content policies), though I am on the service as "ratcreature". My bookmarks there are mangled though, due to the mess with the tags. I absolutely need a way to tag my bookmarks, and to combine tags to find them again, and neither is possible anymore on Delicious, and Diigo can't accommodate my tags. Well, I guess "need" is not technically correct, in that I'd probably survive without a way to bookmark fic easily (before delicious I saved everything and did full text searches on my hard disk if I wanted to find a story again), but I like tagging and sorting things. I find it soothing to have neatly sorted links. Of course right now I don't have that, even though (like most other people) I really didn't need more things to be upset, anxious and angry about. So I decided to pay for a Pinboard account, also as "ratcreature" there.

Right now the import of my delicious bookmarks is still "pending" so I can't really say much about it yet. I do have one question though. I see that it has a bookmarklet for tagging. With delicious I always used the FF add-on, so that had its button in the URL navigation bar. Is there a way to but a bookmarklet there? I usually don't have that bookmark thing visible. I hate having to deal with unwanted change. :(

In happier news, today is my rats' second birthday, and while they do have both chronic illnesses now and need regular vet visits, they are both well enough for now that they enjoyed the scrambled eggs I made them to celebrate. And some months ago I wouldn't have thought that Leo in particular would still be here today for me to cuddle, but with the supportive treatments he's proven himself to be tougher and more tenacious than anyone thought. Projected on a human lifetime it would be the equivalent of him beating a gloomy six month prognosis for over two decades or something like that.
ratcreature: What? Who? When? Yes, I have been living under a rock... (under a rock)
I'm just wondering, because I recall that these Avos people said delicious would transition away from Yahoo in July, but I haven't yet heard or seen anything happening on the site beyond that you could opt into the new TOS (which I have done, also I'm doing backups of my bookmarks every few days now, just in case that lack of any news or signs of things happening is a bad omen). For example plenty of site links still go to yahoo, and nothing seems to have changed wrt accounts that haven't been updated in a while and not opted into anything. Have there been any announcements I've missed, like say a definite date for the switch?
ratcreature: Flail! (flail)
The discussions of the pros and cons of "kudos" on AO3 reminded me that I've wanted to post about whether others found the comment culture and discussions about them (and long critiques as well as the favorite and collection buttons) on deviantArt even more neurotic and fraught than on the typical fan archive/forum or fannishly used LJ/DW.

I mean, whenever I see discussions over this in posts on dA it's likely to be some sort of screed how these days people were only doing "fav and run" instead of how it supposedly was in some mythical ancient time when everybody wrote lengthy comments to help artists improve. (For an example, see this recent post and the comments on it, as well as the second part more about the group feature.)

First, seriously, what is it with that expression, as if it was a bad thing akin to a "hit and run" to bookmark an artwork as a favorite and give it more exposure through people browsing the favorites of artists they like to find new stuff? I know I find most art on dA like that, and more recently also through groups (that I also find by accident when an artwork I like has a group button), since neither the search function nor the categories are up to cope with the sheer number of works.

And second, all this whining about how the quality of the comments sucks and nobody was posting long comments (anymore -- it's always combined with nostalgic projections, which I can't verify, since I have used dA for a bit over two years), actually makes me even less likely to comment on the site, even though I can't quite believe the majority of users would really expect the average comment to be some sort of indepth analysis or review, rather than a quick "Awesome! I like the costume." or "Cool how the fur turned out." or something like that.

I mean, I freely admit that on dA my interaction is mostly of the "adding as favorite" type, because to me it seems a "win-win". I get a bookmark of great art I liked for myself with one click, and the artist gets a quick notification that I added it as favorite, and potentially more viewers if people who landed in my gallery also take a look at what art I liked. And that with none of the social awkwardness of commenting on strangers.

As for the complaint that even comments that are made are of the "worthless" kind, I'm not about to offer unwanted technical advice to random strangers, not to mention that more often than not I'm not actually more technically versed or knowledgeable etc. than the poster, or in the habit of doing technical art reviews, so what could I even say in a comment that would satisfy these demands? For the record, personally I'm happy to get fav'ed, and like short comments. Longer ones would be awesome of course, but I don't expect them as the norm.

Perhaps it is the huge range of users, from professional artists with many followers to the occasional inept doodle poster showing a sketch to some friends, that makes the popularity issues even more central on dA than on fanfic archives, because the displayed stats (number of views, downloads, favorites, and comments) aren't that different from fanfic archives like the AO3 that display hits, comments, and bookmarks.
ratcreature: Woe! RatCreature feels emo. (woe!)
Apparently Yahoo is planning to shutdown delicious and have already gotten rid of all the delicious employees, so maybe that it is not working right for me is already due to degrading infrastructure?

And the other bookmark service I used fannishly, Simpy, (well once upon a time I bookmarked fanart there because they had better tag operators than delicious, but it had been flaky so I drifted away) shut down earlier this year, as I only now noticed. They didn't even sent users an email or anything, so I didn't export my bookmarks from there. Thankfully that were only a couple not the 5800+ I store on delicious. :(

Also SGU was cancelled. And even though I would have rather had SGA, I still watched SGU. I'm not that broken up about it being cancelled, but I'm not gleeful that it's gone either.
ratcreature: Tech-Voodoo: RatCreature waves a dead chicken over a computer. (voodoo)
I'm using the Firefox add-on (version 2.1.106) to bookmark things, but for some reason I can't make my latest bookmarks actually show when I go to my delicious account. When I press the tag button on a page that I bookmarked yesterday, the add-on shows me my tags and note (I assume from some locally stored version), and that I'm logged in, but the delicious site itself doesn't, neither in the recent view, nor when I search for one of the tags. I just bookmarked another page to see whether maybe Delicous might deign to sync with me during a new bookmark action, but now my two most recent bookmarks don't show, rather than just one. The ones before that show okay, but I have no idea what I could have done to make it stop working. I looked in the add-on menu and can see any option causing this.

I did try clicking the "Sync Now" button, but that doesn't do anything, and the "Full Sync" fails. I tried logging out and in again, and after looking at the delicious support forums I tried deleting the ybookmarks.sqlite file in the profile folder, but even with that deleted it doesn't sync.

Is there anything else I could try? Because the on site interface delicous provides seriously sucks, after their latest update more than ever, so I can't really use that.

ETA: I can add bookmarks when I switch to "classic mode" but the bookmarking pop-up in that is horrible, and as soon as I go back to normal mode the syncing continues to fail. :(
ratcreature: grumpy (grumpy)
...I'd make people stop using weird symbols in their delicious tags only to influence the sorting, or make them look pretty or whatever causes people to stick random symbols and brackets into their tags. That kind of thing just makes it harder to browse, subscribe and search by tag, and to generally find and use the bookmarks across the site (outside of one specific account where you see the sidebar, so it doesn't matter much that they randomly put some §, @, ', (, ~ into a tag to make it cryptic).

Even without it there are already significant variations, but if I want to look for say Kirk/Spock slash fic I can reasonably guess to try the tags "kirk/spock", "k/s", "spock/kirk", even "pairing:Kirk/spock" is not too bad, because that is relatively common syntax for those who like hierarchical tags. But sticking completeley random symbols in just sucks.

I realize the tag bundling interface on delicious is so broken that it is a pain to sort tags, so I get the impulse to just arrange tags in groups by putting symbols in. But that makes so many other things harder. *grumble*
ratcreature: RL? What RL? RatCreature is a net addict.  (what rl?)
I've seen some fans say that these days they primarily use delicious to find fanfic to read rather than following fic comms or watching archives directly. I also do that when I search for specific stuff and look for tags, but I don't really use the social network functions. Every now and then I try adding someone, especially if a rec comm also keeps track of their recs on delicious, but somehow I never really stick with it. (And only part of the reason is that delicious often tends to crash or freeze my browser if I view it with javascript enabled, which I suspect is because it can't deal well with my large number of tags or something. It's really quite pathetic -- ~4900 tags is not that many.)

So do any of you use delicious' network feature? Which people (or comm accounts) do you follow to find new fanfic? Currently I'm particularly interested in ST:AOS (though TOS also to some degree), SGA (*clutches*), Merlin, Supernatural (non-Wincest, non-RPS only), and Numb3rs, but as I'm really multifannish and fickle in my interests I'd be interested in what you follow for other fandoms too. Do you have any recs whom I should follow there?

ETA: And please feel free to point out your own account if it fits what I'm looking for.
ratcreature: grumpy (grumpy)
Why do they now have a tag limit?? Worse, the delicious FF extension doesn't inform you of this, it saves the tags properly and you see them if you look at it in the extension (so not cut off like too long notes), they just don't work for the tag searches, meaning I didn't notice while tagging via the extension and have no idea for how many of my bookmarks the tags don't work properly and which one I'd need to edit down to the more essential tags without going through them manually. This sucks. *grump*
ratcreature: RL? What RL? RatCreature is a net addict.  (what rl?)
In the complaint and suggestions forums one of the delicious people mentioned that the new search engine can do NOT-operators. So while putting for example putting "slash-pwp" in your tag field to show you all slash you bookmarked that is *not* a pwp doesn't work, you can now search your bookmarks with "+tag:slash -tag:pwp" and get that result. Maybe everyone but me already knows this, but in case you missed this feature like I did, I thought it worth pointing out.

Also I've seen comments by the poor beleaguered "community manager" intern (who has been really quite nice through this fiasco) that they will bring the "unbundled tags" display back soon. I still think they should have noticed that their users actually want to keep this feature before launching their new version, but it's something at least.

sigh.

Aug. 4th, 2008 01:50 pm
ratcreature: grumpy (grumpy)
Because I'm quite frustrated with the delicious redesign (now revamped without dots -- unfortunately they didn't stop there), I looked at alternative services. Only to find them even worse or just too different in purpose.

Netvouz has no tag bundles, though you can sort the bookmarks themselves into hierarchical folders, but it looked still quite promising, except that once I had imported my delicious bookmarks I found out it allows for only twenty tags per bookmark. If you have seen how I tag you see how that would never work for me. Well, at least it had a bulk deletion feature and I could clean up my truncated bookmarks easily and abandon that service.

Similarly, "Mister Wong" looked promising at first (apart from the stupid name) in that it clones delicious' tag bundles feature, and it even has a rudimentary bulk editing function to change the privacy settings and delete more than one bookmark at a time, however it only allows twelve (!?!) tags per bookmark, which is a ridiculously low number for how I use tagging. So I didn't even look further how it compares otherwise.

Simpy, which I used before, has some nice things like the NOT operator for tags or the groups feature for collaborative bookmarking (or it can be used for just for putting your bookmarks into different display sections without needing separate accounts, much like LJ comms, I guess), however that site rather sucks for browsing your bookmarks, because it lacks the tag bundling. Also for me it has performance problems in that it often is even slower to load than delicious, though at least it freezes my browser less often.

Diigo allows you to highlight text and images and put "sticky notes" on websites, which I guess is cool if you research something and want to annotate or keep quotes and important bits from a website, but it is not all that useful for my reading log type of bookmarks. It also has some bulk editing which is always nice, and group features for collaborative bookmarking. It also has something called "lists" to organize things, though I don't quite understand what it is supposed to do, the introduction texts babbles something at you about it being like folders, only not, but also like slideshows...wtf? (It doesn't sound like anything useful anyway, unless I wanted to present a sequence of websites to someone or something like that, which I don't.) It also has no tag bundling, and the browsing of an account via that account's tags is thus inconvenient and limited, much like with Simpy, especiallly with many tags.

ma.gnolia.com's site design is fairly awful, starting with their ugly blossom banner taking up about a fourth of the browser window height on my laptop screen without doing anything useful whatsoever. And I could tolerate that, but it doesn't seem to display the tags a user has at all, not even as a list, nor does it display related tags. I have no idea how people are supposed to browse their bookmarks there, why have tags and then hide them? So that one is out, even though their feature that they automatically cache a copy of the text content of the websites you bookmark is tempting, because obviously this would work around fanfic you bookmark being lost (to yourself anyway, the cached version isn't public) without having to save yourself.

Why isn't there a social bookmarking site that combines the good features, while skipping the crap? I quite liked the simple bookmark and tag display of the old del.icio.us, including the tag bundles for navigation, so it ought to be similar to that, only with bulk editing for bookmarks and tags (with UIs that don't crash), the RSS subscriptions and networking were good too, then on top of that the NOT operator for tags that Simpy has, and the group creation for several people editing one bookmark list would be cool, decent search and import/export functions of course, and the caching thing magnolia does to not loose content when it vanishes would be a nice extra.

Sigh.

I guess for now I just hope that del.icio.us will fix the worst of the mess in their new UI, so that the tag bundling stuff stops being broken, and the editing options come back as they were. (To segue into my ongoing rant once again, right now you don't have edit, share or delete links anymore for a bookmark you found by searching through your own -- I have no idea why they removed that, it doesn't make any sense. One of the obvious reasons you search through your bookmarks is to find a bookmark you want to do something with, it's not like that is some arcane non-intended usage hack or whatever).
ratcreature: RatCreature is enraged, swinging an axe: Kill! Kill! Kill! (rage)
Some of you may have noticed that I use del.icio.us quite a lot to tag fanfic (unsurprisingly I'm ratcreature there too). I also use a lot of tags, applying the tagging philosophy that you really can't have too many assigned to a story to easier find it again later. The redesigned site tells me it's about 3500 tags now, and I frequently add more.

Now, while I'm a bit dubious about the look of the new design, in particular that in list view the bookmarks, in particular those with many tags (and I tag stories with several dozen sometimes), take more room, I'll probably get used to the more superficial changes. However, that it now doesn't offer you a section with "unbundled tags" is really bad for me. To use recently added tags when they are merely displayed in the huge lists of several thousand other tags is quite impossible.

Their interface to bundle tags has been atrocious before, and drove me crazy (last time I sorted tags I had added into my bundles and changed some it took nearly a *day* and it weren't that many edits), so I only use it to bundle my newly added tags when I have at least some hours to become utterly frustrated, and just use the "unbundled" section to find the more recent ones again. That is now impossible, it seems.

Also, I didn't think this was possible, but the tag bundling interface got *worse*: It now won't load my larger bundles (like the "authors" bundle) at all for editing, and while it does load the smaller bundles, it now jumps you back to the top whenever you clicked on a tag to add it, so you can't even go through the list anymore without scrolling down again and again and again.

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