Journal tags: delicious

Thank you for reading my journal here at adactio.com. I appreciate your kind attention.

I feel should point out that if you’re only reading my journal (or “blog” or “weblog” or whatever the kids call it) then you’re missing out on some good stuff over in the links section.

Just so you know, there are multiple RSS feeds you can subscribe to:

• my journal,
• my links,
• my articles and
• everything all together.

Now it might be that you’re already subscribed to an RSS feed of my links through Delicious. Whenever I post a link to my own site, it automatically gets posted to Delicious too.

Or at least it did.

Despite the assurances from the new overlords of Delicious, the API appears to be kaput. That means my links and my Delicious profile are now out of sync. The canonical source for my links is right here on my own site so if you’re currently subscribed to my Delicious RSS feed, I recommend that you update your RSS reader to point at the RSS feed for my links instead.

By the way, if you don’t want to subscribe to the firehose of all my links, you can subscribe to a specific tag instead. For example, here’s everything tagged with “futurefriendly”:

/links/tags/futurefriendly

And here’s the corresponding RSS feed:

/links/tags/futurefriendly/rss

So feel free to explore the links section and do some URL hacking.

I’ve been using Delicious since 2005—back when it was del.icio.us. I have over 2,000 bookmarks stored there. I moved to Magnolia for a while but we all know how that ended.

Back then I wrote:

Really, I should be keeping my links here on adactio.com, maybe pinging Delicious or some other social bookmarking site as a back-up.

Recently Delicious updated its bookmarklet-conjured interface, not for the better. I thought that I could get used to the changes, but I found them getting more annoying over time. Once again, I began to toy with the idea of self-hosting my bookmarks. I even exported all my data into a big XML file.

The very next day, some of Yahoo’s shit hit the web’s fan. Delicious, it was revealed, was to be sunsetted. As someone who doesn’t randomly choose to use meteorological phenomena as verbs, I didn’t know what that meant, but it didn’t sound good.

As the twittersphere erupted in anger and indignation, I was able to share my recently-acquired knowledge:

curl https://{your username}:{your password}@api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all to get an XML file of your Delicious bookmarks.

A lot of people immediately migrated to Pinboard, which looks like an excellent service (and happens to be the work of Maciej Ceglowski, one of the best bloggers ever to put pixels to screen).

After all that, it turns out that “sunsetting” doesn’t mean “shooting in the head”, it means something more like “flogging off”, as clarified on the Delicious blog. But the damage had been done and, anyway, I had already made up my mind to bring my bookmarks in-house, so I began a fun weekend of hacking.

Setting up a new section of the site for links and importing my Delicious bookmarks was pretty straightforward. Creating a bookmarklet was pretty easy too—I already some experience of that with Huffduffer.

So now I’ll do my bookmarking right here on my own site. All’s well that ends well, right?

Well, not quite. Dom sounded a note of concern:

sigh. There goes the one thing I actually used delicious for, the social network. :(

Paul also pointed to the social aspect as the reason why he’s sticking with Delicious:

Personally, while I’ve always valued the site for its ability to store stuff, what’s always made Delicious most useful to me is its network pages in general, and mine in particular.

But it’s possible to have your Delicious cake and eat it at home. The Delicious API makes it quite easy to post links so I’ve added that into my own bookmarking code. Whenever I post a link here, it will also show up on my Delicious account. If you’re subscribed to my Delicious links, you should notice no change whatsoever.

This is exactly what Steven Pemberton was talking about when I liveblogged his XTech talk two years ago. Another Stephen, the good Mr. Hay, summed up the absurdity of the usual situation:

For a while we’ve posted our data all over the internet on all types of services. These services provide APIs so we can access the data we put into them, so that we can do things with that data. Read that again.

Now I’m hosting the canonical copies of my bookmarks, much like Tantek hosts the canonical copies of his tweets and syndicates them out to Twitter. Delicious gets to have my links as well, and I get to use Delicious as a tool for interacting with my data …only now I’m not limited to just what Delicious can offer me.

Once I had my new links section up and running, I started playing around with the Embedly API (I recently added the excellent oEmbed format to Huffduffer and I was impressed with its power). Whenever I bookmark a page with oEmbed support, I can pull content directly into my site. Take a look at the links I’ve tagged with “sci-fi” to see some examples of embedded Vimeo and Flickr content.

I definitely prefer this self-hosting-with-syndication way of doing things. I can use a service like Delicious without worrying about it going tits-up and taking all my data with it. The real challenge is going to be figuring out a way of applying that model to Twitter and Flickr. I’m curious to see which milestone I’ll hit first: 10,000 tweets or 10,000 photos. Either way, that’s a lot of my content on somebody else’s servers.

I’ve used del.icio.us for quite a while now. I’m storing 1159 bookmarks, each one of them tagged. It works just fine but it also feels a little, I don’t know …stale. There is supposedly a redesign in the works but I’m not sure that I want to wait around any longer to find out if they’re finally going to put some microformats in the markup.

Instead, I’m moving over to Magnolia. I’ve had a Magnolia account for years but I’ve never really used it. I didn’t see the point while I had a del.icio.us account. But whereas de.icio.us appears stagnated, Magnolia seems to be constantly innovating. Also, it uses microformats. There’s also the fact that I know Larry and I’ve briefly met Todd (lovely gents, both) but I don’t know Joshua Schachter. That shouldn’t matter but it kind of does.

Moving from del.icio.us to Magnolia is very straightforward. But that alone wasn’t going to be enough for me. I’m also accessing my del.icio.us bookmarks through the API. It turns out that Magnolia provides an ingenious way to ease my pain. As well as providing their own fully-featured API, Magnolia also provides a mirror of the infamously sucky del.icio.us API. All I had to do was change some URL endpoints and I had Adactio Elsewhere switched over in no time. Other services take note: providing mirrored versions of your competitors’ APIs eases the pain of migration.

I’ve updated my feedburner RSS feed to point it at my Magnolia links instead of my del.ious.us links. If you were subscribed to my del.icio.us feed separately, you’ll probably want to update your feedreader to point to my Magnolia links instead.

It remains to be seen whether I’ll stay at Magnolia. Even though it is functionally and cosmetically superior to del.icio.us, that might not be enough. After all, Jaiku is superior to Twitter in almost every way—design,markup, reliability—but Twitter still wins. That’s mostly because that’s where all my friends are. Right now my bookmarking friends are split fairly evenly between del.icio.us and Magnolia. Then again, I’ve never really made much use of the “social” part of “social bookmarking”.

So who knows? Maybe I’ll end up moving back to del.icio.us at some stage. It’s reassuring to know that moving my data around between these services is pretty straightforward: I can export from Magnolia and import into del.icio.us any time I want.

Here’s a list of websites on which I have an account and which involve some form of social networking. I’m listing them in order of how often I visit. I’m also listing how many contacts/buddies/friends/connections/people I have on each site.

My Social Networks

Website	Visits	Connections
Flickr	Daily	154
Twitter	Daily	205
Del.icio.us	Daily	4
Upcoming	Frequently	95
Last.fm	Frequently	66
Dopplr	Frequently	96
Jaiku	Weekly	34
Anobii	Weekly	2
Corkd	Infrequently	27
Pownce	Infrequently	22
Revish	Infrequenty	9
Ficlets	Infrequently	4
Newsvine	Infrequently	4
Facebook	Infrequently	59
Ma.gnolia	Rarely	7
Linked in	Rarely	90
Odeo	Rarely	10
Xing	Never	2
Digg	Never	0

This is just a snapshot of activity so some of the data may be slightly skewed. Pownce, for instance, is quite a new site so my visits may increase or decrease dramatically over time. Also, though I’ve listed Del.icio.us as a daily visit, it’s really just the bookmarklet or Adactio Elsewhere that I use every day—I hardly ever visit the site itself.

Other sites that I visit on a daily basis don’t have a social networking component: blogs, news sites, Technorati, The Session (hmmm… must do something about that).

In general, the more often I use a service, the more likely I am to have many connections there. But there are some glaring exceptions. I have hardly any connections on Del.icio.us because the social networking aspect is fairly tangential to the site’s main purpose.

More interestingly, there are some exceptions that run in the other direction. I have lots of connections on Linked in and Facebook but I don’t use them much at all. In the case of Linked in, that’s because I don’t really have any incentive. I’m sure it would be a different story if I were looking for a job.

As for Facebook, I really don’t like the way it tries to be a one-stop shop for everything. It feels like a walled garden to me. I much prefer services that choose to do one thing but do it really well:

• Flickr for photos,
• Dopplr for travel,
• Del.icio.us for bookmarks,
• Upcoming for events and
• Last.fm for music.

Mind you, there’s now some crossover in the events space when the events are musical in nature. The next Salter Cane concert is on Last.fm but it links off to the Upcoming event … which then loops back to Last.fm.

I haven’t settled on a book reading site yet. It’s a toss-up between Anobbii and Revish. It could go either way. One of the deciding factors will be how many of friends use each service. That’s the reason why I use Twitter more than Jaiku. Jaiku is superior in almost every way but more of my friends use Twitter. Inertia keeps me on Twitter. It’s probably just inertia that keeps me Del.icio.us rather than Ma.gnolia.

The sum total of all my connections on all these services comes to 890. But of course most of these are the same people showing up on different sites. I reckon the total amount of individual people doesn’t exceed 250. Of that, there’s probably a core of 50 people who I have connected to on at least 5 services. It’s for these people that I would really, really like to have portable social networks.

Each one of the services I’ve listed should follow these three steps. In order of difficulty:

1. Provide a publicly addressable list of my connections. Nearly all the sites listed already do this.
2. Mark up the list of connections with hCard and, where appropriate, XFN. Twitter, Flickr, Ma.gnolia, Pownce, Cork’d and Upcoming already do this.
3. Provide a form with a field to paste the URL of another service where I have suitably marked-up connections. Parse and attempt to import connections found there.

That last step is the tricky one. Dopplr is the first site to attempt this. That’s the way to do it. Other social networking sites, take note.

It’s time that social networking sites really made an effort to allow not just the free flow of data, but also the free flow of relationships.

If you’re using either the Flickr or Del.icio.us APIs, be aware that some changes have been to both recently.

Cal Henderson announced on the Flickr API mailing list that…

…the API endpoints have been changed from https://www.flickr.com/services/ to http://api.flickr.com/services/

The documentation will be updated by and by. If you’re making use of the Flickr API, now would be a good time to go in and rewrite those URLs. I’ve updated Adactio Elsewhere to use the new URLs. There are no plans to get rid of the old endpoints but all developers are encouraged to make the change.

Back in May, the Del.icio.us team announced that all API requests would need to go over SSL:

If the old URL was http://del.icio.us/api/posts/get, the new URL will be https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/get

I missed the memo so, like Dom, I was caught out by the change. On Adactio Elsewhere, I switched over to using PHP’s curl functions to retrieve the XML files and that seems to do the trick nicely.

If you’re tinkering with either API, take note of these changes.

Ever since I switched over to a new CMS back in February, I’ve been tagging all my journal entries. Until now, I haven’t been doing anything with those tags apart from exposing them in category elements in my RSS feed. Now that I’ve got a good head of steam going with my tags, I’ve decided to play around with them a bit.

Each journal entry page now shows the tags at the end of the post. These are linked (using rel-tag of course) to an aggregate tag page that shows any other posts with the same tag. Pretty standard stuff.

But then I thought it would be fun to tie the post in with other things I’ve tagged, not on this site but on Del.icio.us. Under the heading “Related”, you’ll find links to the same tags for my del.icio.us links.

Rather then sending you off to Del.icio.us, I’m using the Del.icio.us API to bring the results back to this site. Using a bit of Ajax, these results are displayed without a page refresh. I’m using Hijax so if JavaScript is disabled, the links will still work.

I’ve got a nice little progress bar going while the request is being sent, and a bit of a colour fade happening when the response comes back. The results themselves could probably do with some more styling. Right now I’m just displaying them in a regular unordered list of x-folk entries but I think they might look nice if they were more comment-like in appearance.

After the Del.icio.us links, I’ve got the same tags pointing off to Technorati. Again, instead of sending you away, I’m pulling in the results with the Technorati API. In some ways, these results are more interesting than the del.icio.us links because, instead of just showing things that I have tagged, this shows results from everywhere. The results are constantly changing. Right now I’m using the search query, but I must look into the experimental tag query.

I’m also using the Technorati API to find any blogs that are linking to the current post. This works like Trackback. If you want to respond to a post I’ve written, just blog about it. As long as you include a link back to the post, your entry will now show up in the results. It won’t be instantaneous, but if your blogging software is set up to ping Technorati when you post, it should show up pretty fast. I’d be interested in finding out just how long it takes for the API to reflect recent pings. If you blog about this post (with a link), try coming back to it and using the Technorati link to see how long your post takes to show up.

The Technorati API isn’t the most full-featured and sometimes it just seems to not respond. The Del.icio.us API allows me to do quite a bit with my own links, but doesn’t offer any access to other peoples’. Still, by combining the two with the tags for any particular journal entry, an interesting picture emerges.

I have some other ideas for making individual journal entry pages more interesting. None of them involve the addition of buttons that invite the reader to add the page to Digg, Newsvine, Del.icio.us, Reddit, Furl, Magnolia, Blinklist, or any other others I may be forgetting.