So following the news that Delicious has been bought from Yahoo!, by the guys who did YouTube, I decided it was time to set myself up somewhere else. It might be that Delicious thrives under its new owners – in which case fine, I can always switch back. But I didn’t want to leave myself exposed, and so I’ve switched to Pinboard.
My account is here, in case it’s of interest.
Pinboard seems to be the geek’s choice of bookmarking service and there have been loads of recommendations for it, largely because it is a no-frills version of what Delicious did well – saving, describing and tagging web links.
It seems fine and I’m currently working out how to get the occasional link posts added here. Hopefully it won’t cause too much bother!
Whither WordPress?
I did wonder whether there was a way of doing all my bookmarking within a tool I already use, though, and WordPress seems to potentially fit the bill – not least because I host it myself and so have total control over my data.
After all, I don’t really use the social features of social bookmarking – and tend to rely on it as a publishing tool.
Here’s what I’d like to have: a WordPress plugin that creates a new content type called bookmarks, that has a bookmarklet to make it easy to save them, with a title, description and tags.
It would let me publish them to the blog either as I save them, bundling them into posts of ten links, or maybe a single weekly post. An option to ping them to Twitter would be nice too, and maybe a dedicated feed of just bookmarks. Oh, and I’d want to be able to import my Delicious or Pinboard bookmarks to, so I’ve just got the one database.
Does something like this exist? Or does anyone fancy making it happen? I’d be eternally grateful…
I personally made the jump to Diigo when the Delicious fandango began. Migrated all my bookmarks with no hastle and it’s been a top system since. Very nice native iPad app and Chrome extension too.
http://www.diigo.com/user/abeeken
I like the idea of having something to work alongside WordPress – there seems to be a lot of plugins to bookmark content ON your blog, but not ones to bookmark TO your blog. I did start looking at using Posterous or Tumblr for social bookmarking, however the process of getting my links out of Delicious sort of put me off. Perhaps a custom post type on WordPress would do it? I don’t know about consolidating existing links, though…
Blog-city has such a thing, has for a while, but they’re shutting up shop soon so no point switching to them. Not seen anything similar in wordpress, but then I haven’t looked yet. Seems such a simple idea doesn’t it.
I guess we could update our little bookmarklet thing from postbureaucrat.com to work with custom post types, or even just to use WordPress built-in Links (which have descriptions, categories, even images… not sure about tags)
Ah for the time to fiddle with such things… 🙁
I have been using Pinboard in place of Delicious for a few months now. Originally I hacked the postalicious plugin about in a complete bodge job, but the latest version now includes pinboard support by somebody who knows how to do it properly. That still leaves the bookmarks themselves being hosted outside wordpress, but once bookmarked, things just get swept up into a draft WP post which I publish when I feel like it – I very rarely go to the pinboard site other than the bookmarklet, so the difference having that going on within WP would be pretty minimal in user experience terms.