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

[cimorene]

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.

Comments

[lotesse]

Nooooo!

[effex]

Psst, that is not my DW name.

Also, I am stealing that link!

ARG.

[cimorene]

You have the same name everywhere but you spell it different ways! Oops. :)

[effex]

Sometimes I just feel more special than others. Or more underscore-y.

[cimorene]

Can't argue with that.

[effex]

RE your ETA: I was wondering about 'Social bookmarking for introverts', I guess that's what it means. Dammit.

[morgandawn]

I have a diigo backup account because it has a similar social flavor to delicious. It caches websites and, unlike Pinboard it, will allow blog posting.

[cimorene]

Yeah, I've already discarded Pinboard as an option for me. I don't need a personal bookmark organizer, although it looks like that might be the way to go for anyone who does. I'm not especially fussed about caching or blog posting - I can think of a lot of other features I'd rather have had first - but it can't hurt.

[mirabella]

Christ, that's exactly what I use delicious for. I have the Arthur/Eames page bookmarked and also currently the Danny/Steve page. I really don't want to have to go back to trying to haunt every fanfic community on the internet.

Shit, shit, shit.

[isweedan]

Pinboard is not built for social discovery? D: NOT THAT ONE THEN.

(Aaaarg. Why didn't we see this coming.)

(Hi from twitter/I totally found you through your fic on delicious!)

[cimorene]

Hi! You did? That's funny; I noticed you were following Wax and assumed you'd wandered over the Wife bridge from Adam fandom!

But anyway, yeah. I actually... kind of saw it coming in the sense that I thought fandom as a whole would eventually need to move off of delicious, but I didn't foresee (in a MILLION YEARS D:) delicious actually closing.

[lim]

Argh! Delicious!

Yeah, AO3 will be there but in terms of search/browse it's not there yet, I agree. I've just advised GG_News to backup to Diigo on the grounds it has an import from delicious function on its toolbar and a relatively familiar interface.

We have to get people to back up to XML, which will at least give us options later on, when we do find a permanent home (and when AO3 IS there, people can move in wholesale if they've got XML backup).

[cimorene]

Oh good! I think the first piece of advice that's been going around has been an html backup though - that's what delicious automatically chooses for you when you use its export function - so we need to make sure that everyone does export as XML before it dies!

[lim]

Having thought about it properly and now looked at the file it generates, actually I think an xml version has no particular advantage over the html backup (it should be easy to pull all the data from the def list).

Normally XML is preferable but we can easily convert this file later if need be.

[cimorene]

Oh, cool. Actually I was just starting to wonder about that, glancing at the file myself. *edits post accordingly*