Dearest Delicious, a breakup letter | Hacker News Reader

Dearest Delicious, a breakup letter

blog.earth2marsh.com

43 pointsth0ma529 comments

At this point, I can't even find my own bookmarks in Delicious anymore. Honest, last night I wanted to check out the link I have saved for Twiddla, so I typed "twiddla" into the search bar at delicious.com.

3 results. None of which were Twiddla.

I know it's in there. It had 8000 points last time I checked on the old interface. But searching for a link to the root of a domain by its domain name doesn't appear to be a use case that the new Delicious team thought of.

Of course, it doesn't show up when searching for any of the tagnames that I or anybody else gave it either. It used to float around the top of "whiteboard" and "collaboration". Now those terms return a few "stacks" (something I'd never heard of before), none of which contain any of the things that used to be tagged "whiteboard".

It's amazing that they could have taken something so simple and good and completely ruined it in so short a time. At this point the best I can hope for is that somebody else has an import tool that will suck my stuff out of it so that I can at least view my own saved bookmarks.

Sad.

I just searched for Twiddla from the main page, and it's the top result, with 3717 saves. Tagged with whiteboard.

http://delicious.com/search?p=twiddla

Is it possible you bookmarked something more specific, like twiddla.com/specific_page ?

Could be that it was just plain broken earlier today, rather than broken specifically for me. The entire page previously consisted of the top two sections that you see now (My Links and Stacks), both of which are truncated to 3 entries with little indication that they can be expanded.

Previously, you'd see the (now re-existant) 3rd section only. Y'know, a list of bookmarks that match your search.

I can confirm that the page was broken yesterday and the day before for me. Started working sometime between yesterday AM and this morning.

Yes, the new delicious was extremely frustrating as you could only search via tags.

Even the old delicious would allow you to search your bookmarks regardless of tags so it was a loss of functionality.

I ended up exporting all my bookmarks to google just so I could search them.

That they would relaunch the service with such a crippled search is beyond me.

Stacks have seriously altered what Delicious is and not in a good way.

I've been using Diigo which I'm not in love with. I couldn't tell you why exactly but I think if I'm honest I just want the old Delicious back.

The one very cool thing that Diigo does which I now couldn't live without: Chrome extension which auto searches your bookmarks when you search in Google. One hell of a time saver. Example screenshot: https://p.twimg.com/AbAkwvXCEAAjLUa.png

I guess we're a lot in this situation. Yet I haven't found the perfect service to replace Delicious. Any thoughts?

I've been enjoying Snip It (http://snip.it/)

I manage my bookmarks locally. Lately I am trying workflowy (though they are not an exact replacement).

The most popular seems to be http://pinboard.in/

I use it and highly recommend it.

So basically there are delicious and pinboard. Is there anything which is quite close to old delicious? Is it pinboard?

It is very simple and fast, that's what I liked about delicious.

how are the chrome plugins for pinboard?

I use two of them and they haven't given me any trouble. Pinboard[1] adds a menu option, which I have positioned next to the address bar. Pinboard Right[2] adds a 'Post Page to Pinboard' link to my right-click menu.

1. Pinboard: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/lclbbneapfiaihigbk...

2. Pinboard Right: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mpiepoibcfbjicpaic...

i pulled the trigger on pinboard, and couldn't be happier with it and the chrome plugins. nice, simple, works!

The official extension is quite basic. Here's a screenshot that shows literally every feature: http://i.imgur.com/sMVY5.png

"Save to Pinboard" and "Read later" work exactly like the bookmarklets, and the four items below the divider are just convenient links to different parts of the Pinboard website. "Save tab set" is fairly useful for moving sessions across machines.

I've been using Instapaper a lot for text to read later, and I need to complete it with something to keep track of my discoveries. Pinboard looks great indeed, but how is the Read later feature? Worth leaving Instapaper?

I also started using pinboard, and the 'killer feature' for me is saving and tagging all of the links I've posted to twitter. I actually started rolling my own before I discovered that they already do it.

Pinboard[1] is implicitly mentioned in the blog post, and I personally recommend it as well.

[1] http://pinboard.in

You can try my site http://wheatt.com/

Its a work in progress, and a few people already use it. I always welcome some feedback.

Its basically a command line-ish search for web pages you add. So you can search by, oh heck, I'll just paste the Help page below, if you'll forgive me:

Search Guide:

    Bare words to search content of web page potatos "brussels sprouts"
    ";" (semi-colon) in front of a word searches your tags ;news
    Combine search elements to narrow search ;favs ;work
    domain.com All pages added belonging to domain.com
    Date searches:
        today Pages added today
        yesterday Pages added yesterday
        week Pages added this week
        month Pages added this month
        saturday Pages added last saturday
        4/5 Pages added April 5th
        jan march Two dates is a date range, inclusive

Edit Guide:

    Use "+" to add a tag to search results ;today +work
    Use "-" to remove a tag from search results ;today -work
    Check to isolate results for editing
    "delete" will delete search results permanently ;today ;work delete

Edit Examples: Adding tags - find all entries with domain allrecipes.com and tag with "food" allrecipes.com +;food Renaming tags - retag everythign with "food" as "recipes" ;food -;food +;recipes

I exported all my bookmarks from Delicious to Evernote. Though it took a while to get used to the new interface and not being a social bookmarking service per se. It has served me well so far for the very same purpose (and more)!

Doesn't it feel weird to have your bookmarks mixed up with your regular notes?

We build http://kippt.com since we were frustrated with other solutions.

I was never able to get into social bookmarking.

Until I was introduced to diigo. It just works.

Best part for me: when I bookmark something, I'm usually bookmarking a sentence, or some information. Diigo lets me do the usual create a bookmark / tag it, but also highlight and annotate the link, something that shows up in my central Diigo feed.

No more digging through my links to find one link, then digging through pages of the article to find the one sentence or point I was looking for.

the other day i opened my delicious page.. and to my horror i discovered that all the bookmarks I added in past few months had one tag with all tags concatenated by a space. it appears that delicious started accepting spaces in tags (instead of using them as delimiter like they have for years), so all the bookmarks i meticulously tagged were useless and i had new tags such as "programming computerscience learning" etc.. had to go through every bookmark and re-add all the tags + delete the monster tags that got created as a result. so.. had to do it couple hundred times. apparently now, only a comma delimits them. why allow spaces inside tags anyway? who made this decision? what good are tags such as the one above? This on top of having to re-install all my browser plugins until i found a version that supports auto-complete again.. seems like delicious was taken over by a bunch of jr engineers and no one at Yahoo gives a fuck about things such as backwards compatibility.

I did my break up and I didn't write any letter. I don't think they care, why should I?

In the spirit of the submitted post: for old time's sake :)

It's a funny redesign indeed: basic things that used to be simple (such as bulk editing tags) are not there anymore, and even basic stuff (editing tags of ONE bookmark) take a long time, since they require a full page reload.

I remember the good old days of Digg. I could write a blog article, get my friends to up vote it (it was very easy to amass a large number of friends on Digg) and the result was 70,000 unique visitors.

I was able to to this successfully at least twice a week. If I had been smarter, I would have monetized it. Instead, my blog floundered and I ended up shutting it down.

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