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.

[andrewducker]

Oh, no! There was the Delicious Rescue thing I found, which I posted instructions for. But then there was the massive project I did to write a web app to take links and post them anywhere. I did post about it a lot:
Go here: http://feedthistothat.appspot.com/ and have a play. It should be fairly self-explanatory, but I'm happy to answer questions if you have any.

If you log in (using any Google ID, either a gmail address or any other email address you've registered with them) then you can (a) store your settings and (b) set up regular postings.

Let me know how you get on!

[miss_s_b]

OK, I have tried to set this up tonight and am getting "no entries found" - do I need to leave it longer between saving the links to delicious and trying to post?

[andrewducker]

Let me know your Delicious username and I'll have a look at settings and work out what's going on :->

[miss_s_b]

snapesbabe

[andrewducker]

Aaaah. I'm going to guess that the problem there is that the date it defaults to is today, and the time it defaults to is 11am. And you have no posts between 11am yesterday and 11am today. If you set the time to 23:00 today then you see three links.

So, if you post at midday tomorrow (for instance) then it will post with any links made during the 24 hours leading up to that point. (Well, unless you tell it to include more than 1 day's worth).

Does that make sense?

[miss_s_b]

Yes, yes it does. Phear my incompetence with 24-hour clocks! I thought it meant 11PM LOL

[miss_s_b]

OK, it said "saved for future posting" this time, which I am choosing to interpret as success. Is it possible to set up autoposting daily, or do I have to do it manually? Cos when I had autoposting set p before I had it set up for a time when I am not generally online to fill gaps, if that makes sense?

[andrewducker]

Yup, it will now post at the time you set.

If you look a bit further down the page you'll see:
"Scheduled Posting"
Check the "Post repeatedly" box and it will post every n days (where n is the number you originally set).

I'll look forward to seeing the results tonight!

Oooh - except that apparently you got your DW password wrong, according to the logs...
If you go back to the page now you should see a bit at the top with "Previous Results", which tells you that. Set the date/time to when you wanted the post to happen, tell it to post repeatedly, and try again with the right password.

[miss_s_b]

Good gravy I'm rubbish, aren't I> LOL

[miss_s_b]

OK, have put in the right password this time. I don't see anything about scheduled posting or repeated posting, though, and I have scrolled all over the page. I know that sounds unbelievable, and am willing to provide screengrabs if necessary... I expect your views of my competence are at an all time low at this point.

[andrewducker]

You need to be logged in to set up repeated postings

[miss_s_b]

It says I am :( Emailing you screengrabs

[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]

In my case they all get forwarded on to Twitter and then DW->LJ, so that's not an issue, but thanks for the warning!

[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.

[andrewducker]

Bad developer, you haven't asked what the requirements are, and you gave an estimate!

The requirements are:
1) Store links, along with a subject line, tags, description and whether they are public or private.
2) A button on various browsers to trigger said storage.
3) Autosuggestion of tags based on the ones used by other people.
4) Autocompletion of existing tags for the current user.
5) Android thingy for saving links.
6) RSS feed to extract links.

That feels like more than a couple of days to me. Am I wrong?

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Bad client, the requirements have already changed!

You never said anything about a browser plugin. Or Android. No idea about those. Also, what is 'autosuggestion' if it's not the same as 'autocompletion'?

[andrewducker]

You didn't ask for my requirements! You looked at the things I was complaining that various sites did badly/not at all, and assumed that was everything I wanted. The things that they did well I didn't mention at all.

Autosuggestion is when a bunch of people have already linked the same link as I'm about to, then the tags they used are presented as options for me to select if I want to (so I don't have to type them at all).

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

That's not too complicated.

I'm now pondering whether to make the url be an entity in its own right, and each user's link secretly contains a reference to it rather than the string. Would make lookups potentially easier, and the tags could be replicated onto it for that sort of thing.

[andrewducker]

It's an interesting thought experiment, but unless it's something you fancy for its own sake then don't get stuck into it. If you did it, then it would need to go on a server somewhere, and maintained, backed up, etc. If lots of people did use it then there would undoubtedly be scaling issues. Unless it was your aim to run it as a going concern, it's just going to be hassle...

(It's a lovely thought though, and thank you for that.)

[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.)

[andrewducker]

1) Who is suggesting making an entirely new platform for bookmarking links?

2) I don't follow him on Twitter, I just have what he said in email to me.

3) And I like being able to look at a link and find previous things connected to it by clicking on the tags. That's what the tags are there for. If that's not your use for tags, then that's absolutely fine, but to me that is the point of them.

Particularly, as it turns out that my previous usage of the tag "margaretthatcher" doesn't mention her name anywhere in the link or the description:
http://delicious.com/andrewducker/margaretthatcher

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

1) Um. momentsmusicaux is.

2) You should, he's great.

3) So in your actual usage case, the tag also does nothing, since it's only connecting to one other link, and is thus essentially useless. Also, you didn't address my point re: manual adding. Is the annoyance of having to manually type tags worse than being with Delicious?

[andrewducker]

1) Aaaah. Don't take that thread seriously. I'm certainly not, I was joking around in the first place, and said at the end of it that it's not something I have any interest in.
2) I don't read Twitter. Haven't in a very long time, and never did more than intermittently.
3) And it does something - it links together tags on the same topic. In this case it would link together two tags about Margaret Thatcher, so that people who see the second one and wonder what else I've tagged about her can find the first one.
3) Yes. Losing the entire point of tagging (for me) is not worth the pain of Delicious occasionally being flaky. I am looking at Diigo, which seems to do everything I want, but I need to add a reader for it to my feed app before I can do that, and I'm busy rewriting my CV at the moment.

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

...losing the entire point of tagging ≠ using a keyboard.

[andrewducker]

I don't understand what you're saying there.

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

You're not losing the entire ability to use anything but the 1000 top tags. You're losing autocomplete. You didn't answer my question – is manual typing really so bad it completely renders a service obsolete for you?

Also: given that Pinboard gives you your tag cloud and you can click tags to add them, is that not an acceptable substitute?

[andrewducker]

Aaah, gotcha.

In this case, I didn't know if my tag was "MaggieThatcher", "MargaretThatcher", "Thatcher" or something else (or, indeed, if I didn't have one).

With autocomplete I can try a couple of those out and get the right one fairly quickly, rather than having to go off and find the original link to get the right one.

At the moment, Delicious is being a bit slow, and somewhat flaky, but not so godawful that I'm clamouring to get out. If I was then I'd put up with the autocomplete lack, or go to Diigo. But there's not enough pressure to put up with the lack of a feature I use every time I post.

[andrewducker]

By the tag cloud do you mean the big list on the same page?

That only contains the most common 1000-odd tags you have, sadly. I checked that first!