Today I spent some time making changes, to no avail (Pinboard and Dreamwidth edition)

[andrewducker]

First, I decided to finally transition over my links to Pinboard, as I'm fed up with Delicious timing out on a regular basis, having maintenance windows that last four times as long as they say, doing redesigns, and generally behaving like Livejournal.

The transition went fine, Pinboard worked faster, and seems pretty smooth. And then I discovered that their autocomplete only works with your most popular thousand tags. As I have 3,541 tags this is less than useful. Sure, the most popular ones will be there, but the first link was about Margaret Thatcher, and it turns out that I've linked a story about her precisely once before - so the tag "margaretthatcher" isn't going to be one of the most popular ones. So that knocks _them_ out of the running, which was completely unexpected. Anyone got any alternate suggestions?

My other project for the day, following LJ's inability to read RSS feeds recently, was to transition my comics filter over to DW, as their RSS reading is working just fine. This took me about an hour, as the import doesn't seem to pick up RSS feeds. And then, once it was done, I discovered that you can't make reading filters public on DW in the same way you can make flists public on LJ. So while you can happily read http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/friends/comics you can't read http://andrewducker.dreamwidth.org/read/comics - which would be fine if I didn't know of a few people that read my comics filter. So I lodged a support request, but that's not going to get a speedy resolution

*sigh*

And now it's time to put down the internet, tidy the flat, do some shopping, and then head to the airport to meet Julie.

Comments

[miss_s_b]

I miss the ability to easily make linkposts. :(

[andrewducker]

What problem are you having? I wrote a whole web thingy that effortlessly turns links on pinboard or delicious into DW posts - Mat has it set up for himself (not that he ever links things) - did you bump into problems trying to use it?

[miss_s_b]

I used your thingy for a long while with delicious but then delicious went screwy, and I know you posted a fix but I never got the spoons up to tackle it.

[matgb]

FWIW, reading filters being non-public is a known bug that's being looked at, but they need a dev volunteer with time to figure it out, Mark coded the reading filters but it never occurred to anyone to make the public/private.

I find it very annoying as I'm sometimes logged out and have them bookmarked.

If you fancy playing around with soem Perl, it should be a fairly easy thing to fix (ie, the code exists but it's in the wrong place) but I barely grok the basics currently.

[andrewducker]

If I knew Perl, I'd be leaping in there...

Oh, and a certain someone seems to be having problems with link posts. Care to lend her a hand?

[matgb]

I've never even looked at the site but Diigo is used by some for bookmarks. (I just went to look at a recent request vaguely on teh subject but that was about Pinboard).

Alternatively, the long term plan is to completely overhaul the 'memories' feature and turn that into a social bookmarking setup because simply put if LJ had used what they had in that way it'd have been market leader in so many fields but...

[andrewducker]

If LJ had been well run then they'd have been the market leader in so many things.

I _asked_ for the "Post RSS to my own journal" functionality in suggestions back at the dawn of time, which would have easily covered link posts!

[andrewducker]

Oh, and cheers, trying Diigo now!

[cyprinella]

Diigo may make your bookmarks that they consider adult private on you. This is why I went with Pinboard over Diigo, since most of my bookmarks are explicit fanfic. They mostly cater to students and teachers.

[andrewducker]

GAH!

Diigo does include all of the tags, is nice and simple to use, is incredibly quick...and doesn't do RSS correctly.

*headdesk*

If you look at the RSS at:
http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/andrewducker
and
http://www.diigo.com/rss/user/Andrewducker
you'll see that delicious uses "category" to tell you what tags are applied to each link. Diigo, on the other hand, just lumps them all in together as plain text in the "description" element.

So I can do it, I'll just need to write a custom parser. Not the end of the world, just a pain. I'll look into it over the next couple of days.

[poisonduk.livejournal.com]

I hope her flight lands. It's pretty windy past the airport! Fingers crossed for her.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Autocomplete limits results? What a load of crap.

(Let's just build it in Drupal ;)

[andrewducker]

Awesome! What's your estimate? :-)

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Feed me pizza for a couple of days? And babysit.

[erratio.livejournal.com]

Much respect to you for persisting despite the stupidity of technology! I've had similar issues in the past and my usual response is to struggle for a few hours before throwing my hands up in frustration.

[andrewducker]

When there's something I want, and I know it's possible to get it, I tend to be pretty dogged. The combination doesn't come along often enough :->

[skreidle.livejournal.com]

I'm not a fan of tagging schemes that don't allow multi-word tags. :)

[andrewducker]

Delicious does nowadays. But I'm so used to CamelCase that I don't tend to notice a lot of the time.

[davidcook.livejournal.com]

Late comment here - the lead developer on Pinboard proved to be very responsive and helpful in making changes requested by "Fandom" (i.e. fanfic reading/writing fandom, not general-SF-Fandom) when they moved off Delicious - so maybe send in a request and see if he can do it ?

[andrewducker]

Have done so. Am so far being waved off with "We have lots of people with loads of tags, and they don't have issues."

*sigh*

[davidcook.livejournal.com]

The other obvious comment - 3541 tags ! You need to consolidate, you'll never find anything in that mess !

(only slightly tongue-in-cheek)

[andrewducker]

There's no a lot of duplication in there, so far as I know. Some, certainly, but I've tagged stuff over a huge range of things.

So, for instance, I have one tag for "MargaretThatcher". I can't consolidate that with anything else!

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

You know that if you tweet at him he'll probably just fix it within a few days?

(Also, what on Earth is the point of a tag you've used once? Why not just search 'Margaret Thatcher' in the search box?)

[andrewducker]

How is it going to get used twice if it's not used once?

If I tag something about Margaret Thatcher _now_ then I want to be able to also find the original thing that I tagged about her. That wouldn't happen unless I used the tag way back then, anticipating that some day she was bound to do something interesting again.

(And I emailed him. He's said that it's for reasons of speed, and won't be changed for months, if ever.)

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

So, firstly, on Twitter he's said he's working on it but doesn't have an ETA due to the scale of the issue.

Secondly, given that anything you bookmark involving Thatcher is going to have the phrase 'Margaret Thatcher' either in the link title or description, and given you can search your past bookmarks, the tag is useless. It doesn't aid in your ability to find the bookmark again in any way, so what's the point of having it? And when you _do_ need to use an esoteric tag is it really that hard to spend a couple seconds looking it up?

Thirdly, is it harder to make an entirely new platform for bookmarking links than it is to adopt a new tag usage case? (Hint: no.)