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My friend Orla tipped me off the other night that Yahoo had plans to get rid of Delicious.com. Ugh. Now, I've been using Delicious (originally called del.icio.us) since about 2006, when my work PC's hard drive crashed and took with it about 50 bookmarks I had just compiled for a feature article I was working on. The help desk swapped out my PC for a new one, but the bookmarks were gone forever.
Delicious has been great because I could access the bookmarks from any computer, work or home, and I could tag them all sorts of different ways. So I could go back and forth between tagging stuff for work at work and stuff for the SCA or other personal interests at home and still be able to find everything later. Even though I never made my bookmarks private, I didn't really use the social networking aspect much -- after all, "sca" tends to stand for "service component architecture" as much as "Society for Creative Anachronism" -- but at least I had an always available place to stash my links.
I now have more than 1800 links on Delicious, and while a few of the older ones may have gone 404, most of them are still there. So I was most unhappy to hear this news and spent some time scouting around teh intertubez for some alternatives.
As it turns out, Yahoo is actually looking for someone else to take over Delicious. Well, that's more positive news. In the meantime, at least I exported my Delicious links to an HTML file under my control, so if Yahoo speaks with forked tongue and DOES shut down the service after all, at least my past work won't have vanished completely.
In the near future, I may try two or three other different services as long as they're free. Evernote sounds like the most promising one. I heard about it at the conference I attended last month, and Ezra Klein recently sang its praises.
(Incidentally, I like the idea of a "commonplace book." I've kept notebooks like that at various times in my life, even when I was a kid. In fact, I have a paper notebook like that for the SCA ... if I could only find it!)
Delicious has been great because I could access the bookmarks from any computer, work or home, and I could tag them all sorts of different ways. So I could go back and forth between tagging stuff for work at work and stuff for the SCA or other personal interests at home and still be able to find everything later. Even though I never made my bookmarks private, I didn't really use the social networking aspect much -- after all, "sca" tends to stand for "service component architecture" as much as "Society for Creative Anachronism" -- but at least I had an always available place to stash my links.
I now have more than 1800 links on Delicious, and while a few of the older ones may have gone 404, most of them are still there. So I was most unhappy to hear this news and spent some time scouting around teh intertubez for some alternatives.
As it turns out, Yahoo is actually looking for someone else to take over Delicious. Well, that's more positive news. In the meantime, at least I exported my Delicious links to an HTML file under my control, so if Yahoo speaks with forked tongue and DOES shut down the service after all, at least my past work won't have vanished completely.
In the near future, I may try two or three other different services as long as they're free. Evernote sounds like the most promising one. I heard about it at the conference I attended last month, and Ezra Klein recently sang its praises.
(Incidentally, I like the idea of a "commonplace book." I've kept notebooks like that at various times in my life, even when I was a kid. In fact, I have a paper notebook like that for the SCA ... if I could only find it!)
