RatCreature's Journal

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.

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.

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?

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.

...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*

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*

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).