Finally Using del.icio.us

I was feeling guilty/greedy about not gobbling up the fare on the del.icio.us bandwagon. I was accusing myself of being one of those control-freak programmers who would rather build their own shit rather than save time. I was too hard on myself.

The motivation to use del.icio.us comes from my research activities. It is useful to store new links “in the cloud” instead of one bookmark file for one installation of Firefox. This will allow me to glide among my virtual machines and perform research tasks with a centralized tool set and storage location. The problems start when you install del.icio.us Bookmarks on top of Sage. You can’t convince me (today) that del.icio.us is a news feed aggregator when its tag manager throws JavaScript errors left and right (Firebug does not lie).

Yes, I’m sure you can checkbox your way out of this but, by default, installing del.icio.us Bookmarks clobbers Sage. Not only does it vacuum up all the bookmarks but it also defines new categories. Trying to remove these links and categories at the del.icio.us Web site is extremely painful—no “Web 2.0” usability innovation for miles and miles…

Yes, I am sure you can prevent del.icio.us Bookmarks from sucking up all of your bookmarks but there should be better checkbox language about what it intends to do. Fortunately, when you uninstall del.icio.us Bookmarks it can faithfully restore your bookmarks to their previous state in Firefox—unfortunately nothing like this happens on the del.icio.us Web site. We look forward to the del.icio.us team learning something from the folks behind YUI. Can’t these Yahooligans get along?

rasx()