Balaji’s Blog

Goodbye del.icio.us – it was time to roll my own

Well for a long time now, I’ve been using del.icio.us as a means of blogging the various articles I read on the web. I would add a bookmark in delicious and every night, the links would appear in my blog along with my tags and descriptions – all very neat.

Except I’ve constantly been irritated by del.icio.us’s bone-headed decision to limit descriptions to 255 chars. And if like me, you like to add a little commentary, links to earlier posts and referrer info¹; the 255 character limit gets real boring – real fast.

So when I read this article on LH about getting a list of tabs from Firefox in your email; I decided it was time to make the switch.

What really helped was finding about this Firefox extension – now I could very easily find out from which site I had come when following a link and could properly add the “via” information.

So, the process works like this now:

1. Open up all the “Geek News” sites I read.
2. Ctrl+Click on a bunch of different articles
3. Some tabs are closed after a casual read-through, cause they are not worth it.
4. The good ones stay open; till all other tabs are closed.
5. Use the Send Tabs extension to get a plain text list of all the tabs²
6. Use the “How’d I get here” extension to figure out the “via” info.
7. Now the really geeky part – to convert the links into a bulleted list; add proper “via” links etc, I use Auto Hotkey and a script originally posted on LifeHacker, which I’ve personalized. Essentially this script allows me to automate all the HTML for lists, links etc so all I have to do is Cut,Paste and type a keyword.
8. Copy the whole block of HTML into Performancing and post!

I’m finally free of those irritating character limits and it hardly takes more time than the del.icio.us method. I don’t have per-link tags anymore but that’s a small price to pay.

Unfortunately, this just means there’s another item on the site redesign/cleanup list (sigh).

1. yes I know sites like Digg or MeFi hardly need any more link traffic; but still it’s just about being polite you know? [↩]
2. This is a bit screwy at work because Lotus Notes support is a bit flaky [↩]

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 27th, 2007 at 5:30 pm and is filed under Geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.