del.icio.us
01 Jan 2006 - Davedel.icio.us is a social bookmarking site. I checked it out a few times in the past but I never quite got it.
A few months back I found myself using a number of different PCs regularly. The Internet is a key resource for my job so I collect a lot of bookmarks. More and more the bookmarks I needed were on another PC.
I tried most of the bookmark synchronizers out there. Even cobbled a few Python scripts together. In the end nothing seemed to work for what I needed.
del.icio.us has a couple features that sold me.
- All of the bookmarks I saved on del.icio.us could be accessed from any browser on any PC where there was an Internet connection.
- Each bookmark can be tagged with one or more tags to categorize them.
- There are a few ways to slice and dice the tags and bookmarks that really helps when finding stuff.
- And then I figured out the social part of it. del.icio.us shows how many other folks bookmarked the same webpage. A couple of clicks and you can see what other bookmarks are related.
And then del.icio.us went down!
That day or so could have been really tough. del.icio.us had become a big part of how I did things. I was right smack in the middle of planning a major upgrade and all of my resources were stashed on del.icio.us!
About a week before I was thinking how much it would suck if something happened to del.icio.us. So a crude wget script was born to backup my bookmarks. It was scheduled to run automatically.
When del.icio.us went down at least there was an xml file with my bookmarks. Between building a stylesheet and looking for alternatives I came across Scuttle.org
A half hour after downloading it to the Fedora box it had my bookmarks imported. While Scuttle is not quite del.icio.us I was able to get back to work.