Delicious website issues may affect Delicious Post

Delicious is currently undergoing a data center move, but there are outstanding issues which is affecting Delicious Post.  (Delicious is owned by Science LLC, and AE Creations is not affiliated with it, nor has any involvement in the Delicious website.)

These issues may cause problems when posting links to your Delicious page.  You may receive error messages such as "error posting link" or "504 GATEWAY_TIMEOUT".

All I can say is to try posting again later.  There isn't much else I can suggest, as these errors are being relayed back from the Delicious service.

[EDITED] The Delicious Post Extension: Implications of Yahoo!'s Sale of Delicious

Word came today that Delicious, the online social bookmarking website which Yahoo! acquired in 2005, has now been bought out by the founders of YouTube.

This caught my attention, since not only am I a loyal Delicious user, I am also maintaining a Firefox extension, Delicious Post, for adding bookmarks to Delicious. I was also interested to learn what this would mean for Delicious Post, because for quite some time I've been struggling to make it work with OAuth-based Yahoo! logins without much success. OAuth authentication is painful to implement, with so many steps to follow and a lot of room for errors, many of which are difficult to isolate given that they could originate from one's own code or from the code libraries being used (or unknowingly misused). The poorly-written Delicious OAuth documentation hasn't helped at all.

According to what I've read in a Delicious developer forum post, the old-skool Delicious logins will still function, but users with Yahoo! logins will have to migrate to using Delicious logins. So this means that I no longer have to worry about making Delicious Post work with OAuth authentication. Woo hoo!

What will this mean for current Delicious Post users? Since Delicious Post only supports the old-skool logins, current users can continue to use this Firefox add-on without any issues.

EDIT: Don't forget that you need to accept the new privacy policy and terms of service agreements in order to continue using Delicious beyond the transition from Yahoo! to AVOS, the company that is taking over Delicious. You should be prompted to do this when you visit your bookmarks on the Delicious website.

Delicious Post

A while ago, I came across del.icio.us post, a simple Firefox extension that lets you post a link or the current page to del.icio.us Delicious. It has just the basics you need to quickly create a del.icio.us   Delicious bookmark to the current page, and while it lacked some features from the official Post to Delicious bookmarklet, it was still quite useful.

The author doesn't appear to be maintaining it anymore; but since the code is licensed under a Creative Commons license which permits modification of the work, I decided to start my own fork of this extension -- which, as it turns out, two others already exist (Post to del.icio.us and Jaggnito).

My version is named "Delicious Post" -- not only to distinguish it from the original extension, but to (grudgingly) reflect the new name given to this popular social bookmarking service.

» Download: Delicious Post 0.7.3 (10.5 KB; English (United States); compatible with Firefox 3.0-3.0.*)

This release introduces compatibility with Firefox 3, and includes some behind-the-scenes code fixes to give it a stable foundation for future planned enhancements. There are no new features in this release. Full details of changes can be found in the changelog.

Why?

Because eventually, I want to add a few additional features that are missing in the original del.icio.us post -- such as allowing private bookmarks, tag name autocompletion, and automatically using the selected text in the web page as the bookmark notes. But most importantly, I want to be able to use it on Firefox 3.

But I like del.icio.us post the way it was!

I suppose that you, and many others, do. That is why the additional features I have planned will be configurable so that they can be disabled if you prefer the primitive UI.

Will Delicious Post be compatible with Firefox 2?

No. The Mozilla Corp. plans on ending support for Firefox 2 in December 2008 (that is next month), and there is no point in making it compatible with a version of Firefox that will be officially retired in a month. I also want to make use of some APIs and developer features that is only available in Firefox 3 and above.

If you are still using Firefox 2, you should install the original del.icio.us post extension.

I found a bug. How do I report it?

Send bug reports to the AE Creations mailing list; please mention Delicious Post in the subject line. If you have a Bugzilla account on Mozdev, you can file a bug here.

Classic del.icio.us Bookmark Viewer: for those of you who miss the old del.icio.us

I've been using and adjusting to the "new Delicious" user interface for the past two weeks (it was unveiled to the public on 31 July).

There are a few things I like about it. Minor improvements such as:

• Being able to switch between three different bookmark viewing modes (regular, title and full viewing modes)
• Having the option to sort my bookmarks alphabetically.
• Ability to navigate to specific pages in my bookmark list instead of having to hit the "earlier" or "later" links repeatedly.
• Drop-down list of matching tags and auto-completion of tags when entering them in the tag filter box at the top of the page.
  

The latter two are the most significant improvements that I find useful. But other than those minor improvements listed above, I hate it. How do I hate it? Let me count the ways:

• The new layout doesn't make efficient use of space; there is too much wasted white space in each bookmark item in the new UI while in the old version everything was neatly compact, yet readable. Also, the placement of the bookmark date stamp for all bookmarks created on the same date results in an unnecessary and useless blank margin on the left-hand side of the bookmarks page.
  
• Tab completion of tags in the Add Bookmark UI wasn't working at all (that problem has since been fixed).
• The '+' operator to filter bookmarks by combining two or more tags in the tag filter box is now treated as part of the tag name!
  
• Some of the subtle grey colours in the UI (like those on the background of tag names for each bookmark) are simply bad choices, as they barely show up on LCD screens.
  
• The Delicious team has done away with time stamps of, for example, "5 minutes ago" or "2 hours ago" on recently-added bookmarks.

Here is a screen shot of the "new Delicious" UI, taken on 15 August 2008. Compare this to the screen shot from a past posting.

The "new Delicious."

There was supposedly a "limited" preview of the new UI, but I don't believe that it is a sufficient means of gauging user reaction and feedback to the new UI if it's so limited (users have to sign up for it and hope to get an invite to join) and not well publicized (I knew nothing about the "limited" preview until the day before the "new Delicious" went live).

Introducing the Classic del.icio.us Bookmark Viewer

I dislike the new user interface so much that I felt compelled to do something. So I put together a simple tool that sort of resembles the look and feel of the old del.icio.us.

The "classic del.icio.us bookmark viewer" can be found at http://aecreations.mozdev.org/delicious/bookmarks.html. It was created by combining a linkroll and a tagroll into a single page, and using CSS styling to give it a somewhat familiar look and feel. Simply enter your del.icio.us user name, choose how many recent bookmarks and how many tags to display, then click Get Bookmarks.

The Classic del.icio.us Bookmarks Viewer

By no means is this tool meant to be a complete replacement for the "new Delicious." It is missing significant capabilities of the old del.icio.us site, like editing bookmarks and filtering by tags (the latter isn't working with linkrolls), but I hope that many people would find it useful.

Upcoming changes to del.icio.us -- er Delicious

I'm an avid user of del.icio.us, the online social bookmarking service where you can organize your bookmarks into tags and share them with other users. It's convenient and addictive -- more so if you've got the del.icio.us browser bookmarklets and the Firefox extension installed. I've become so dependent on it for bookmarking interesting links that I rarely post to my browser bookmarks anymore. And the web-based nature of del.icio.us lets me share my bookmarks across multiple machines without the need to resort to tools like Foxmarks or Google Sync (the latter is no longer available for download).

Screen shot of my del.icio.us page, taken on 30 July 2008

Today, as I was visiting my del.icio.us bookmark page, I found a notification at the top of the page informing me that I will need to remember my login info because the permanent del.icio.us browser session, which eliminates the need to log in to that site every time I start Firefox, will expire when the "new Delicious" is rolled out in the coming weeks.

New Delicious? And with a capitalized "D" with no dots?

That piqued my curiosity enough that I had to read more about it in the del.icio.us blog. Turns out that a new version of del.icio.us has been under development for over a year. There is little mention about it, despite the claim in a post penned by the founder of del.icio.us, dated 1 February 2007, that the del.icio.us team would provide regular updates to keep users informed:

I feel that during this very exciting time for the team I’ve personally had less capacity for talking more openly to the delicious community about what’s been going on. Given that we’ve undergone a lot of changes and have a lot more in store in the future, I want to resolve to be better about communicating.
. . .

Going forward, we’re going to be talking much more about what’s changed, where the bugs are, and in general, more explicit about what we’re doing.

But over a year later, only four posts after this one made any reference to the new version of del.icio.us.

I wish I was in on the limited preview, but I doubt I'll get an invite now since I signed up so close to the launch date, which is supposed to be very soon. It would have been a good chance to see what the upgrade would be like, and to offer my feedback as a regular del.icio.us user. For now, the closest thing to a preview are these screen shots on TechCrunch.

Based on what info I could find on the upgrade, as well as what I've learned whenever a small Internet company is gobbled up by a larger corporation, I have a few concerns:

• Will the old del.icio.us URL, http://del.icio.us, co-exist with the new URL, http://delicious.com? If not, this change will most certainly break a lot of users' bookmarklets.
• Despite the takeover by Yahoo! in 2005, del.icio.us users have continued to use their own IDs, and new users can sign up without opening a Yahoo! account. Will this continue -- or will we be forced to merge our accounts with Yahoo!, similar to what happened with Flickr? Many readers will remember that the Flickr-Yahoo merge faced harsh backlash by so many loyal Flickr users.
  
• The current del.icio.us UI is fast and responsive, even on 56k dial-up. Will the upgraded del.icio.us be slow and heavy with AJAX doodads and JavaScript-driven eye candy for even the most trivial functionality?
• And while on the subject of user experience, I've always admired the simple, yet elegant, design of the del.icio.us UI, and even tried to incorporate elements of it in a prototype del.icios.us client I wrote a while back. I think this is a unique characteristic of del.icio.us that helps it to visually stand out from the millions of websites out there on the Internet -- and any move to detract from its present design would be a shame, in my opinion.
  

And finally, what's with the recent move to eliminate the dots and referring to it as Delicious?

Update: The new Delicious launched on the morning of 31 July 2008. Details in this TechChrunch blog post. The Delicious blog explains, in their announcement of the transition to the new version, why they got rid of the dots in their name, and claims that the old URL will continue to work.