But the worst part is that you can't even save a link with all these changes they’ve made! I was getting errors 90% of the time (maybe even 98% but who's counting) so it was pointless to even try to save (I gave up after 4 days).
Whoever's managing Delicious is probably the most incompetent person in tech. Their communication with usersbase has been atrocious. They made only one or two blogposts and remained completely silent on social media (Twitter) during all these disastrous changes. People were unable to get their links and the company remained mum. Number of "F Delicious" posts on Twitter was very high few months back. Their site still doesn't work and you can't save links (just tried).
Anyway, I found Pinboard and have been happy since. RIP Delicious.
I've told Tony several times I'm eager to discuss buying the site once it finally finishes crushing what remains of his spirit, so it can begin crushing the remains of mine.
With regard to the domain name, Science Inc. explicitly declined to sell delicious.com along with the site, so they could perform some kind of SEO asshattery with that domain in the future.
As a loyal user of Delicious, I hope Tony is able to turn it around. It's really depressing to see thousands of my bookmarks become unusable. The site doesn't even support https.
Respectfully, I hope you don't buy it though. I want me bookmarks provider to be free of politics.
Sounds about right.
I really hope that doesn't happen. Pinboard is perfect.
Funny to see people saying this in 2016.
I switched to Pinboard in early 2011, after rumors of Yahoo "sunsetting" Delicious. A few months later, Delicious was sold off, and it wasn't long before they made the site "completely unusable" for the first time. I didn't realize it was still around, TBH.
I think delicious really shined when their focus was on making adding bookmarks easy. It had a Firefox add-on in which you just had to CTRL+D to save that bookmark. Now, you need a bookmarklet (what is this, 2006?) since the extension has been removed a long time ago. I wished pinboard's focus was on it, it's not that hard. Currently I'm using an extension which has no keyboard shortcut, and after saving a bookmark, it's unclear whether you saved it or not, since it's showing a blank page.
It's crazy how many different incarnations the site has had.
I mainly use Pinboard as a kitchen sink for articles and completely random stuff I stumble across. You can actually tell from my totally schizophrenic tag cloud. At some point I was using a custom made script that bookmarks Hacker News story I'd +. So now I have hundreds of "hackernews" tagged bookmarks which I NEVER access.
I rarely go to Pinboard to retrieve a bookmark, maybe 10 times a year. It's faster to Google and for the stuff I really need to go back to I have local bookmarks.
I'm also a heavy RSS consumer: for sites for which I like to be updated of new content, I use my self-hosted RSS reader, no need to use bookmarks.
I guess I will keep on storing away links, the service is cheap anyway.
Someone asked me yesterday how it was I read so many crypto papers, after citing Bos and Costello in crypto dork Slack. I forgot to tell them my trick: I don't! I just follow citations and bookmark the hell out of things.
I keep meaning to write some script that downloads jstor PDFS that I want to pin, uploads them to my server, and bookmarks them as private there. But trying to figure out whether I'd need to add a robots.txt and the like has kept me from making it happen.
Self-hosted alternatives usually require some kind of interactive website front-end being set up or have some jenky browser extension support. Pinboard has pretty solid browser support so I can add to it wherever I am.
I use hugo to generate a links page from pinboard's RSS on my website. Every time I build the site, it pulls the RSS feed and formats it all pretty like. It's not extremely interesting or anything, but here it is in case you're curious[0]. Pinboard user pages aren't all that pretty, but it's really just a container for your data.
[0] [link redacted]
From https://mobile.twitter.com/xach/status/751518747941363712
https://github.com/bookieio/Bookie
https://github.com/plainmade/unmark
Especially Bookie looks good and would be a preferred candidate to transition to if you are still using the very old 'Sitebar', 'Scuttle' or the interesting 'Semantic Scuttle'.
You can then present them via javascript to allow filtering, searching, and tags.
By default, it won't even start on modern distributions because of incompatibility with Python >=2.7.11 ("cannot import name _uuid_generate_random"). The requirements.txt file require a few version bumps. I haven't tested whenever the project actually works correctly with those yet, but it seems to at least start with kombu==3.0.35, celery==3.1.23, billiard==3.3.0.23, amqp==2.0.2, redis==2.10.5.
(I'm lazily toying with it remotely, setting it up on a small ARMv7 host, wrapping it with Docker+honcho+gunicorn, and rebuilding the image when I update requirements takes long time...)
Also, idlewords, as you are here: any plan to make search listing more items (50? 100?). It's a function I use a lot and sometimes this pagination makes it slower to find an old link.
The number of daily signups and so on has been steady for years, I'm glad someone else is worried about it, so I don't have to be.
Ad 2. Glad I can help!
I knew 100% this was a low maintainance business, but I admit reading "the first wave of subscription renewals came due" and "I did almost nothing on the site this year except keep it running" almost in the same phrase hit me like a punch in the stomach; envy for his business acumen/talent I suppose :)
The only problem now is that there doesn't seem to be a working add-on for Firefox on Android. Does anyone know of one?
Obviously you could use anything for the 'pi' keyword - that is just the keyword for the bookmark.
This is the 'location' that I use:
`javascript:q=location.href;p=document.title;void(t=open('https://pinboard.in/add?later=yes&noui=yes&jump=close&url='+...
Main complaint is that it's not from Maciej but the author seems committed to keeping it stable with improvements.
I have Pinner too, but I prefer Pushpin's UX, just feels smoother and more responsive.
It's one of my everyday tools, and would pay a monthly fee if it ever gets to that.
A perfect example of "do one thing, and do it well".
Del.icio.us was very good, but at some point it went to shit. Maybe it was when it was acquired by Yahoo? I remember trying to contact support about the broken Firefox plugin. They didn't fix it for over 6months.
There seem to be a gazillion open source bookmarking projects out there. It's hard to go wrong if you're the only user and willing to host it for yourself.
I signed up years ago when delicious decided to completely redesign their service for no apparent reason and broke backwards compatibility with all plugins and made the main site less usable.
I am very happy that none of that asshattery is happening at pinboard and the site remains the boring plain ugly link collector that it is.
I do find myself using pocket more and more however and would be curious if Maciej has any thoughts on that service. seems like so far the've done everything right. Although they are aggressive with new features which to me is a little worrisome because sooner or later some executive will try to be brave and fuck it up with useless redesign.
Pocket has released a number of premium features that put it more in Pinboard's area of strength, but at this time I'm happy to continue using Pinboard.
Pinboard has been the same for years and I feel little attachment to the product.
I am unsure what to switch to, but Pinterest looks like an interesing and innovative solution.
If Pinterest looks interesting, then yeah you probably really hate Pinboard. I think it's a feature that I don't hit those annoying nag walls, get inundated with ads and tracking, load hundreds of images on a page, and require cookies and lots of JS to just browse feeds. Different strokes for different folks.
Why would you care if you get more value than you pay. Or alternatively, why would you pay for it if it didn't?
Are you switching only because of the above reason or is there something missing that you'd like to find elsewhere?
I am, too, a long term Pinboard customer. I don't care if Maciej does no work whatsoever in an average year as long as Pinboard works or is fixed quickly when it doesn't. I may be biased, because my wife and I both enjoy his writing and talks a lot so it "feels" like we are to an extent sponsoring that too.
I find it tremendously encouraging that it is possible to manufacture such a business and keep it running as well as it does for so long.
I suspect that user idlewords does more than he lets on in his marketing.
I'm glad there are people who tell jokes, honestly.
Also in my costs are email (transactional via Mailgun, marketing via MailJet), DMARCian, AWS S3 for avatars and attachments, SSL (still paying for a wildcard, perhaps let's encrypt next time round), Google Apps for email to run the business.
It's realistic to spend around USD 10k per year running a moderately successful medium sized web business.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12049410
Not sure if the other 2 winners have posted anything new or not.
But you should really make a video how it works and what are the benefits, that would make it easier to really understand.
