arduinna

First, and VERY IMPORTANT:

Everyone should check to see if they actually got transferred; I know at least one person who signed the agreement in the last allowable day or two whose bookmarks didn't make it over. (And now I've found two whose accounts moved, but whose bookmarks didn't. wtf.)

If yours didn't, there's a mailto link for migration issues on the contact tab of the Help page. Sooner is probably better than later for contacting them; even assuming Yahoo has held on to the old database for problems, they're probably obligated to dump it sometime soon as a condition of the sale.

Okay, on to the actual content of this post:

I started seeing posts on my droll about the new delicious and how awful it is, and went to look.

( Wow, that's pretty freaking awful. )

And all that is just on an initial poke around the site. I am just baffled that they rolled this out with so many existing features broken or missing. It makes the site effectively useless, at least for now. I don't understand why they broke every existing social feature in an effort to make it more social.

The one thing that does work is sitewide search; you can type a word into the search box at the top and bring up pages of links. But with the site's layout, it's hard to actually find anything, between the oceans of white space and only ten links showing up at a time anyway. And to get to them, you need to scroll past your own links first, then past any "stacks" that people created with that search term even vaguely associated with it (e.g., a search for SGA brought up four stacks: two for SGA fic, one for Darren Criss [because the URL for one of the youtube videos in the "stack" included the letters SGA], and one for Tanzania [I have no idea; I couldn't find "SGA" anywhere on the page]. Yeah.).

And apparently the new "stacks" function works, but even if I wanted to use it, the way the site is physically set up now makes that unbelievably painful to do. "Find three or more links and add them to a stack!" -- well, great, but I'm only allowed to see ten links at a time. Out of my thousands of links. The only way to find them is to click page after page after page after page after page, yet again.

Which has just led me to realize -- of course. They're going for page clicks over actual usability or accessibility, to look more appealing to advertisers. Awesome.

But hey, they're promising "buttons" and "badges", so, you know. Woo-hoo. Because that's what I really want on a social bookmarking site.

(Okay, I admit, I am an old fogey of a cane-waving dinosaur; I do not understand the obsession with buttons and badges. Icons/avatars on posts/comments to show who you are, sure. But images that exist just to clutter things up that provide no actual information? No thanks.)

( *Deep breath*. Okay, I will attempt to end on a semi-positive note, at least. )

I guess for now I'll wait it out and see if they can manage to get the site fixed to a level where it's at least functional again -- and meanwhile I'll start copying my last year's worth of bookmarks over to pinboard, just in case.

At the Muskrat Jamboree (

muskratjamboree) in late March, I offered to give a couple people a tutorial in using del.icio.us, which came up as a way to find things in small/rare fandoms (although it's also great for big fandoms). We didn't really have time at the con, so I figured I'd write something up.

If you're reading this and wondering what all the del.icio.us fuss is about, here's very fast overview, before I get into the tutorial part.

The basics

At it's most basic, del.icio.us is... bookmarks. *g*

The bookmarks are spiffy, mind you -- they sit on the del.icio.us servers, not on your computer, so they're available to you anywhere, if you have a browser and a connection; no more worries about "oh, crap, I bookmarked that at work. At my last job. CRAP."

There's also a section to add notes or a description to any bookmark, which is really cool (you can put a quote from a story, for example, to remind yourself about it). And best of all, there are tags, which make finding things so freaking much easier than trying to scroll through 800 random bookmarks that you forgot to stick in folders, or figuring out which folder you stuck something into. Personally, I think it's cool just on that level, but trust me: there's more.

The cool stuff

Okay, now on to the real reasons for fans to use del.icio.us: it will bring you stories and vids and suchlike that you might not find on your own. There are two main ways to do this: the Network, and the Subscriptions.

Network

The network is sort of like a Friends list. You find people whose bookmarks interest you, and you add them to your network, and then any time you go look at your network page, you see all the bookmarks from all the people in your network.

Subscriptions

The subscriptions are... not like anything on LJ, I don't think. *g* They're how you track different subjects across the entire del.icio.us network, by subscribing to tags. I use these for pretty much all my fandoms, but they're crucial for small fandoms, so you don't miss anything. You can subscribe to any tag you can think of; if someone uses that tag on a bookmark, you'll see it show up on your subscriptions page.

This is really the strongest feature for fans, because it gives you access to everyone's tags, regardless of whether you know them, or whether they're really in the fandom or just doing a flyby one-shot bookmark on something.

The extras

There are some other cool features, too.

search

del.icio.us comes with a search, which lets you search either all of del.icio.us, just your own bookmarks, or the web. I don't use this often, but when I need it, it's a lifesaver (usually when I remember a keyword in a story that I neglected to use as a tag, but stuck in the description somewhere).

Links for...

del.icio.us lets you send links to specific people, as long as they also have a del.icio.us account. You just tag something for:username and it shows up in a private section called "links for you" in their account. No one else (not even the person you tagged) can see that you used that tag; the for: tag is only visible to the person who actually uses it.

privacy

del.icio.us allows you to save things privately, so that only you can see them, and it gives you a little indicator on any privately saved link so you know it's safe. This is fabulous.

Checking things out

If you want to see what someone's bookmarks look like, mine are here:

http://del.icio.us/arduinna

and you can see my network and subscriptions here:

http://del.icio.us/network/arduinna

http://del.icio.us/subscriptions/arduinna

If all of that sounds good and you're an intrepid sort who likes to figure things out completely on your own, go get an account at del.icio.us, and start bookmarking and tagging. Yay!

More info

If you want a more info, read on below for a basic tutorial, or go to my website for a far more detailed version.

( On to the tutorial )

( Getting an account )

( Bookmarks )

( Tags )

( Subscriptions )

( Network )

( Privacy )

( Egoboo )

( Advanced stuff )

And again, if that wasn't enough information, I put a far more detailed version up on my website, covering more features, and with step-by-step instructions on a lot of things, including screencaps.

I've added a new page to my recs site: quick recs. It uses

astolat's very spiffy script that lets you pull bookmarks from del.icio.us into an automatically generated, sortable page. I've got mine set up to handle a bunch of different things, from new_recs (anything that I'm planning to add to my recs page in a future update), to recs (anything I've ever recced, including new_recs), to Yuletide, to various fandoms, to vids. I bookmark things much more often than I update my recs site, so I'm seriously happy about this script.

For Yuletide, I've got 48 recs in 39 fandoms, and I still feel like I've missed most the archive. But at it's time to put these, at least, up.

All of the recs in one place:

Yuletide 2006 recs

Recs by fandom:

Addams Family

Avatar: The Last Airbender