Tech and life

Delicious

Most of you will probably know that Delicious relaunched under its new owners back in September promising an improved bookmarking service. First thing I noticed after the launch was that there wasn’t much buzz or enthusiasm in the tech blogosphere so that didn’t bode too well. In fact there was a lot more buzz when the sale was announced with people rushing to export all their links.  Anyway, if you’re a regular Delicious user, you’ll know that the service has been an utter disaster since its relaunch and is only now slowly starting to take shape – however it’s still lagging well behind the service I used to know, which wasn’t that great anyway and had stagnated for years. I have to say I’m surprised they launched when they did. They could at least have a taken a leaf from Twitter’s book running the old and new services side by side and giving users a choice until the problems were ironed out. Or just waited until it was right.

At the moment, it’s not possible to bulk rename tags, but doubtless that will come in time.  The old Delicious used to list all tags alphabetically on your ‘my links’ page which I liked. But now we have a truncated list of your most popular tags instead – not good. You can still get an alphabetical listing but it takes a couple of clicks so I’ve resorted to adding the link with all tags sorted alphabetically to my bookmark bar for quick access.

(Update – December 2011: It’s now possible to get an alphabetical listing of tags on the Links page. Thanks Delicious.)

Diigo

In the light of the lack of development of Delicious over the years, I’ve actually been using Diigo as my main bookmarking site for over a year now with Delicious just a backup of those links. It’s possible to save your links on Diigo to Delicious and although this didn’t work for a while after the Delicious relaunch, I note that it is back working again now.

One thing that bugs me in Diigo that I’ve noticed recently is that it’s been set up to display a maximum of 5000 tags. Although it will store more than 5000 tags, when you list your tags sorted alphabetically, it will only list the first 5000. In addition and probably linked to this, annoyingly, the Diigo browser extension won’t auto-complete tags which have names beyond the 5000th in your tag list. So if you want to use a tag say ‘zoho’ that you’ve used in the past, type in ‘zo’ and it won’t autocomplete. Okay, you might say 5000 tags is a bit much but if you use multi word tags, you’ll soon get up there.

(Update – December 2011: This flaw has now been fixed! Thanks Diigo.)

So that’s a quick look at some problems in Diigo and Delicious – if anyone’s interested. Judging by social networks, blogs and podcasts, probably not.

Do you use bookmarking sites any more? Or just search for the information you’re looking for? Drop a comment below.

How do you search for information online? Do you go straight to Google or do you go back to your archived bookmarks which you’ve carefully tagged for future reference? It’s the usefulness of this bookmark archive as a go-to source I want to look at here.

Bookmarking is just a form of content curation based on human indexing. I have all my bookmarks in the free version of Diigo (with copies sent to Delicious). A point to bear in mind is that usually bookmarking sites don’t archive full web pages, just the title and any tags you attach to the bookmark. Caching or archiving full web pages is usually a premium paid feature, not surprisingly. Delicious doesn’t support page caching. The free version of Diigo only allows caching of up to 5 web pages per month while the basic package allowing unlimited caching costs $20/year.  You can compare all the features of the free and paid versions of Diigo here. Another bookmarking service is Pinboard.in, but they have a sign up fee and then charge $25/year if you want archived copies of bookmarks with full text search.

Advantages of bookmark archive

I’ll need this page again: Bookmarking and caching a web page can be really worthwhile if you’re afraid that at some point in the future it may no longer be present online or it may get ‘buried’ with time and you won’t easily be able to retrieve it again. So it’s used for safekeeping. With a Google search, findability is often not repeatable for specific pieces of content over time, ultimately resulting in more time to retrieve stuff previously found. The paid packages at Diigo and Pinboard allow caching of web pages so that, even when the original page is not available or no longer online, you can still see what the original looked like.

Combine bookmarks with Google search: You can set up Diigo so that from the Diigo search bar, a Google search will show any relevant Diigo bookmarks.  But you’ll really only see the real benefit with the paid web page caching bookmarking service when Google can search your archived pages and not just the titles.

Disadvantages of bookmark archive

Free service is limited in terms of search: Searching the bookmark archive will generally only cover the tag name and the article title, unless you’ve cached or archived the whole page. And of course if you haven’t cached the page your archive search may lead you to a bookmark of a page which is no longer online. On the other hand, a Google search is free and will reach the page contents, not just the page titles.

Can you remember the tag you used? If you’ve forgotten the name of the tag or tag phrase you used to archive the webpage it can be hard to track it down again. For example, I use the tag ‘humorous’ for anything funny I archive. I have to remember this is the tag. If in future I forget I used that tag and start to look for tags ‘comedy’ or ‘funny’ in my archive I won’t find the article. Similarly, if I start to tag new items with the ‘comedy’ or ‘funny’ tag, I’ll end up with my humorous stuff spread over three tags.

I try to use two-word tag phrases. For me, tagging everything say WordPress related under the single-word tag ‘Wordpress’ would be inefficient and it would be really hard to track stuff down in there. But even a web page with a two-word tag can be difficult to track down. For example, I’m thinking of changing the theme for this website and I remember that a couple of years ago, I bookmarked a post on a WordPress plugin which allows you to try out new themes on your site privately but still leaves the original theme in place for visitors. I couldn’t decide if I’d tagged the page as ‘Wordpress-tips’ or ‘Wordpress-themes’.  In fact, I’d used ‘Wordpress-themes’ but I only found the post by trawling back through the posts with this tag and I eventually found it – Theme Test Drive. So it’s still difficult to search for posts in a bookmark archive unless you’ve cached the pages.

Here’s another problem related to two-word tags – tag inversion. For example, did I use ‘wordpress-backup‘ or ‘backup-wordpress’ when tagging a page last time? So I end up with stuff spread over two different tag phrases. The important part is identifying a tagging system that allows me to put things into categories where I can find them again quickly and that’s not easy. One way to partly get round this problem is to adopt a convention for two-word phrases by using the sequence verb-noun (or in this case ‘backup-wordpress’). That way you can be consistent with tagging and hopefully find articles in your archive more quickly.

Archiving of content ‘just to have it’: I’ve taken this as a disadvantage as it’s all too easy to archive stuff you think you might need at some point but never actually get round to using again. In fact it’s just cluttering your archive of more important useful stuff.

Limited choice: Bookmarking can only cover a very small portion of web pages on a subject. You hope you’ve bookmarked a useful representative page from many available, but you might not have and given time, the information on your bookmarked page may be superseded by up-to-date info on newer pages which you would find with Google search.

So is archiving worth it?

This post Has Search Replaced Bookmarking on Six Pixels of Separation comes down in favour of Google search together with asking friends on Facebook and Twitter. However,  a read through the comments on that post suggests that, for many people, bookmarking still has an important part to play in archiving and sharing content.

All in all, when looking for content, you may be better just to stick to a Google search or ask on Twitter or Facebook. Having said that, I think the utility of the bookmark archive is not in searching it, particularly where the pages aren’t cached, rather having a set of definitive useful posts with no clutter and carefully tagged for future reference.

How do you retrieve online information? Do you use a bookmark archive and if so do you have any tips on quickly retrieving information there? Drop a comment below.

If you use either of these services and you follow the latest tech news, chances are you’ll know that both have been in the news recently. Xmarks was to close down but found a buyer in LastPass. More recently, Delicious has been the subject of feverish rumours that its owners Yahoo! were to shut it down. In the event, it looks like Yahoo! will try to find a buyer for it.

The blogosphere will pounce on rumours and ‘bad news’

Unfortunately, much as the old print media used to do, many tech news bloggers pounce on early rumours or perceived ‘bad news’ and blog about it despite the fact that it’s just a rumour and everyone else is doing the same thing. I follow quite a few tech blogs and the amount of posts on both stories was quite staggering, all trying to present the early rumours, how to export your data from the ‘sinking ship’ and any viable alternatives to the services.

The future is bright

There’s no question that the internet is still in its infancy. Services will come, go or be bought up in the inevitable shake-down that will see the cream rise to the top. Despite the initial ‘bad news’ of a possible shut down, any really great service with a poor or non-existent business plan, like Xmarks, will surely be snapped up and continue in some form. Other services like Delicious which haven’t progressed much in years in terms of new functionality and innovation, face the very real prospect of being overtaken by newish kids on the block like Diigo which notably allows you to cache bookmarked pages making them searchable in your bookmark archive. So don’t panic. If it’s a good service, it will probably be bought up or be replaced by a better one. The site AlternativeTo lists software and applications you might want to replace and gives great alternatives, based on user recommendations. It lists a number of excellent alternatives to Delicious including Diigo.

What can we learn

1. If you do keep up with the latest tech news with a blog RSS reader, don’t let the blogosphere ‘freak you out’ when shut-downs are rumoured. If you use Google Reader, try using Google Reader Filter to filter out the flurry of activity when these rumours or ‘bad news’ stories arise. Do this by adding terms like Xmarks or Delicious to your Excludes list. Then switch the filter off after a week or two to see what’s actually going to happen after all the rumours have died down. If you don’t follow tech news closely, you may just miss all this and wonder what all the fuss has been about. Indeed, tech news does seem to have a very short shelf life.

2. If it’s a great service used widely, chances are it will be bought up and continue in some form, possibly freemium,  so don’t panic.

3. The internet is still in the great shake-down. Many services are starting up to rival more established services and offering more bells and whistles. There are alternatives out there, or one will quickly emerge to fill the gap. For example, there are plenty of tech posts out now listing Delicious alternatives and how to export your bookmarks.

4. Make sure you can export your data from any service you rely heavily on and would miss if it were to fold so that if the inevitable does happen, you can quickly move over to a new service.

Any thoughts on this? Drop a comment below.

It happens to us all at some time. We’ve read an interesting web page, bookmarked it and tagged it but when we go back to look for that page in our bookmarks sometime later, we just can’t find that exact page again no matter how hard we try. I hate losing things in the real world and get just as mad when I do the same in the digital world. Still, at least in the digital world we have tools at our disposal to make tracking down web pages easier.

Some people would say that bookmarking on a site like Delicious is an old fashioned way of doing things anyway. Better to just do a search on Google or Twitter. They may be right. I just feel that it’s still helpful to bookmark a useful web page and add it to your info archive of great pages so you can call upon it again to refresh your memory of what was said, for example, to use it as a tutorial for a task or to help write a blog post. The other really important aspect is that many web pages aren’t static and can be altered or deleted at a later date. Adding important web pages to a disk archive can get around this.

I thought I’d go through some of the tips and tricks I’ve learned about bookmarking and managing bookmarks which might help. I’ve bookmarked close to 12000 web pages in the 2 years I’ve been using Delicious, the online bookmarking tool, so I have to have an effective way of searching through them otherwise it’s all pointless. You wouldn’t throw paper willy nilly into a filing cabinet and expect to find a page again quickly. You have to file it in such a way that you know how to retrieve it again. So let’s look at how to try and avoid losing bookmarks.

Vital web pages which you just don’t want to lose… ever!

Web pages can get deleted, updated or otherwise removed from the internet. For example, the recent demise of Yahoo’s Geocities will lead to the deletion of 7.5 million web pages. Bookmarks can also be lost if your bookmarking service suffers a data loss as happened to ma.gnolia back in January this year. For vital pages which you must have a copy of, there are a few things you can do to keep a permanent copy:

1) Clip the web page directly from your browser into an organizer like say Evernote or bookmark the page with a research tool like Diigo which bookmarks the entire web page, unlike Delicious. More about that later. It will now be fully searchable within these apps.

2) Save the web page as a pdf and download it to your hard drive, then make sure to back it up. There are a few ways to do this. First, you could copy the URL of the web page to loopApps (choose add URL and paste the URL). Then click the disk image icon to the left of the pdf name and download it to your PC. The second way would be to install a print-to-pdf utility like doPDF which I’ve talked about before. From within your browser, choose Print from the File menu, then, rather than print to a printer, print to a pdf file. You may want to use a bookmarklet like Printliminator or PrintWhatYouLike to extract just the elements of the web page you want before printing to a pdf. If your web page is in fact split over a number of pages where you have to click ‘Next’ to read the full story, you could use a bookmarklet like PageZipper which automatically merges all the ‘Next’ pages into one page before creating the pdf. Once you have downloaded the pdf of the web page, it’s searchable from within a pdf reader like Foxit Reader, it’s searchable using a desktop search utility like Copernic Desktop Search, or again just add the pdf of the web page to Evernote where it will also be searchable there.

3) Saving a web page as a pdf doesn’t always preserve all the formatting, however saving as an mht file will. Then archive it on your hard disk. Rich Menga of PCMech has explained how to archive web pages using MHT files very clearly together with a video.

4) Use a service like backupURL to save a copy of the website online.

They give you a link to the backed-up website, which you could save in your Delicious bookmarks. I noticed that even if you elect to save a particular web page, it saves the whole website as the links away from that page are still active. Not sure about their claim that the link will last forever though. If it’s really important, I’d still back it up as well using methods just mentioned above.

Your vital web page is no longer online

If you’ve bookmarked a page and it’s no longer online and you hadn’t followed the procedures above to save it or backupURL hasn’t worked for some reason, you may possibly be able to retrieve the page at the Wayback Machine. Using this, you can often find pages that have been removed or deleted from the live web years ago. If you find it, save it using the steps I outlined above.

Save web pages to read later

If you’re in a hurry, have found a great site but haven’t got time to read it straight away and you don’t want to lose it, you could save it to read later using the Firefox extension Read it Later or the Read Later bookmarklet. Once you have time to read the web page, you can then follow the other tips I’ve listed to bookmark it, tag it, clip to Evernote or Diigo or save it as a pdf or mht file.

Using tags effectively to classify and group your bookmarks

Giving your web page a really specific tag can go a long way to tracking down that page again. If I can’t find a web page straight away, at least if I can narrow it down to a specific tag category, I can look through those and hopefully find it. When I first started using Delicious, I assigned pages into really broad categories, eg software, internet, computer, windows, backup, making it really hard to track down specific pages with any of these tags. More recently, I’ve been using hyphenated tag phrases to give pages more specific categories. Using the backup tag as the first example down my Delicious tag list, here’s a screenshot of those tags:

Notice that it’s helpful to put the common word first (backup) then the modifier (eg browser) rather than the other way round. This keeps them all adjacent in the alphabetical tag listing in Delicious. I notice that further down the list I have a category driver-backup which I should change to backup-drivers. Obviously, if you have been using both alternatives interchangeably (eg gmail-backup and backup-gmail), this will surely decrease your chance of quickly finding that elusive missing web page. It’s quite straightforward to sort this out by renaming a tag in Delicious. Go to Tag Options at the top right corner and clicking Rename under Edit Tags, fill in the old tag name and the new tag name and then click Save. Everything with the old tag will be given the new tag.

Another possibility for more effective tagging is to use Facette, a Firefox plugin, to force you to be more specific about how you want to categorize each bookmark. Facette is an enhanced version of the Delicious tagging tool and creates a number of additional tags in your Delicious library.

Searching your bookmarks

You can obviously search your bookmarks in Delicious for lost web pages, but remember that this actually only searches the bookmark title, tags and any notes you inserted in the notes field when you saved the bookmark. However, it may be that the vital things you remember about the page aren’t in the title tags and notes but contained within the content of the web page itself. I heard it put very well on an Evernote podcast as tip of the tongue syndrome – where any one of the little hooks or memories you have in your brain about the web page will hopefully be just enough to track down that lost web page. So to find lost bookmarks, it would be much more useful if you could search the content of the bookmarked web page as well. There are a few services which offer this: first Deligoo, but unfortunately, this Firefox extension is not compatible with the latest versions of Firefox; second Delizzy – but I can’t recommend this as it seems a little buggy – it can take ages to log into your Delicious account and read all your bookmarks. As an alternative, you could export your bookmarks from Delicious to Evernote but unless you’ve actually clipped the pages into Evernote, it will just search the headings of the bookmarks and not the content – at least that’s what I’ve found. If I’m wrong, please let me know and I’ll update this.

Another possibility is bookmarking the web page with Diigo which makes the entire page searchable. David Pierce has written a great post on Diigo at MakeUseOf. As with Evernote you can import all your Delicious bookmarks into Diigo.

Another choice is to build a custom search engine to search the full content of your bookmarks. There’s a great post by Sarah Perez at Read Write Web on building a custom search engine to search your Delicious bookmarks. This involves exporting all your Delicious bookmarks as an html file and importing them to a Posterous blog, then linking a Google Custom Search Engine to this to search the content of your bookmarks. Sarah’s post explains the method very clearly. I’ve tried it and it works well. The only real problem is that it’s a little cumbersome constantly updating the list of bookmarks on your Posterous blog.

So to summarize, the best ways to search the full content of your bookmarks for a lost web page is either with a custom search engine or with Diigo. So far I’m pretty impressed with Diigo.

Hope you’ve found these tips useful in managing your bookmarks and tracking down lost ones. Of course if you have other ways of avoiding lost bookmarks and keeping track of your info archive, please drop a comment. I’d love to hear how you deal with this.