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.