god jul!

★ MIL asked me to make goodies for Wax's family's Christmas

★ I've decided to make the most of this by making things I want (English trifle, pb/chocolate cups, cinnamon rolls, sugar cookies)

★ But I'm not too confident when it comes to making Wax's family's favorite types of candy

★ We still have to do a bit of Christmas shopping, and it has to be tomorrow

★ They're predicting -30°C here & we have to travel to MIL's, overnight, with the pets. The dog has to go outside like 6 times a day these days. She lives on the 3rd floor and doesn't have an elevator. Perry's afraid of her stairs because you can see the floor between them. -_-

I always make the best fashion bargain finds by accident in the children's department

This Minnie Mouse-ish halter dress, which is slightly too big for me, is a little girls' size 164 (that's cm of height and is meant to be like age 12-14 or so) and was on 50% sale at Lindex for 15€.

It's got a stiff tulle underskirt and the back is elasticized, but it's sort of sagging because it's meant for someone with a greater torso circumference. I think I'll take it in with a few simple darts - I don't really want to bother ripping out the lining and doing it all properly and stuff.

( 2 pics )

MAYDAY: Delicious will be shutting down; here's how to save your bookmarks

Yahoo seems to be feeling poorly and has confirmed the demise of delicious (h/t effex), and we don't own the servers! Fandom's not on delicious to the extent it was on Livejournal at the time of, say, Strikethrough, but remember how scary that was, before Dreamwidth was in beta, and how it kicked us in our collective fandom ass and AO3 was eventually born? Well.

This isn't a maybe, this is definitely shutting down. And it's definitely not the same as losing Livejournal, but if Livejournal is fandom's house, then Delicious was perhaps its car, or one of its several cars. Maybe its bicycle. The point is, a huge, huge repository of our community's collective information, representing not hours but years of painstaking fanpower-hours of sorting, categorizing, and lovingly labelling fanfiction and art and resources on the part of hundreds or thousands of individuals - it's all marked to go!

What are we going to do?

For starters, spread the word and back up your shit.

11 Ways to Backup your del.icio.us bookmarks may be of interest.

Delicious will export for you through Settings>Bookmarks as an HTML file with tags intact, and I gather there are other sites on the net that can read/import this information, so that might be a good place to start. I also saved an XML version of mine following those directions.

There's no Dreamwidth-equivalent on the horizon, here. AO3 already has some bookmark functionality, including a bookmarklet for external works; I'm not sure this is the ideal solution, though, even if fandom does own the servers, because for one thing, there's still a waiting list for accounts, but for another, delicious's browsing functionality isn't there (yet?), and that's what we as a community need the most. I have 30+ popular and recent pairing and fandom tag feeds in my sidebar bookmarks! How am I going to replace *that*?

ETA:

1. I see many people at bookshop, copperbadge, and effex talking about Pinboard, but a cursory examination reveals that while it may be great for backing up your personal shit, it's not a delicious replacement for fandom at large because it's designed for personal, not social use, and the filtering functionality is correspondingly lower.
   
   From its Twitter:
   
   

   
   "@PinboardIN I'd say you should rethink your featureset to include social at some level."
   ↵ @luxuryluke that goes against the fundamental concept of
   the app
   about 2 hours ago via TweetDeck in reply to luxuryluke
   
   to our faithful longtime users: please don't worry, we're not
   going to be adding "social"
   about 2 hours ago via TweetDeck
   
   "@PinboardIN while i'm new, and i love your service, you should at least provide a way for us to find eachother again"
   ↵@luxuryluke yes I absolutely agree - we're working on public profiles so people at least have the choice
   about 2 hours ago via TweetDeck in reply to luxuryluke
   

   
   
   So on the plus side, they are working on public profiles. But on the minus side, their focus is explicitly away from the social side of bookmarking.



2. The problem is, as someone put it on my Twitter feed, I don't need delicious for my bookmarks, I need it because it's where other people have tagged the [fanfiction] internet. I don't spend 3-10 hours a day refreshing my own bookmarks, I spend them browsing other people's bookmarks, tags, and more complex tag+tag filter searches. Delicious is where I go when I come home from a movie and I know that somebody must have already written some slash for it. And that functionality can't survive unless most of us go to the same place, so that's what I'm anxious about: The New Delicious, if you will, one that fannish consensus can settle on. To that end, I'm slightly hopeful about the future of AO3 after this tweet from @OTW_news: "Fannish bookmarkers: the AO3 has a bookmark feature that might suit your needs! More news soon!"



3. When you open delicious's exported html file in the browser, the tags will not be visible, but they are there. You can see them if you open the file in a plaintext editor. The exported file isn't a great way to save your information for personal use because of this, but it does make it easier to import your bookmarks elsewhere to some later service.