Tag: del.icio.us

The conversation of ‘readme’

It used to be that when I found an article that was too long to read there and then, I would add it to delicious, tag it as ‘readme’, and hope that one day I would get around to it.

These days I just click my Kindlebility bookmarklet and read the article next time I’m on the bus or train, but still get value out of the articles that other people are posting to delicious. Am I doing them a disservice by not posting things I think are interesting enough to read? What social obligation am I under to reciprocate in this loose-form network? Why does it worry me? Should I learn to let go, or should I write code to free me from this tyranny?

A tastier bookmarking tool

The practical stuff first.

In February 2009, inspired by Pete Prodoehl, I set up my own version of scuttle, an open source del.icio.us clone, and hacked it to auto-post my bookmarks to my del.icio.us account using the php-delicious library.

I have finally pushed this to github. My change is literally about ten lines of code, although as my delicious account testifies, it has bugs that I haven’t been bothered to fix. It is currently version 0.7.4 of scuttle, and I plan on merging it to the latest 0.9 in a day or two.

Update: actually it looks like I set this up in 2006, way before I remember!

Downtime for a global service? Tell me when in UTC!

If a service with an allegedly global audience, say one run by Yahoo or by Google has some scheduled downtime, they always give the time when it will be back, or the time when it went down, in PST. Now I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t give a flying fig about when the downtime began on the other side of the entire planet. What I do care about is what that means to me as a user. I want to know when it went down for my timezone, and when it’s going to be back. It’s not as if there aren’t services which do exactly this and it’s not as if it’s beyond the scope of global behemoth-like IT businesses to do this themselves, but it what it gives everyone outside of the US is short shrift and two fingers up.

Making a blog post about your downtime isn’t enough. Giving out useful information is. As it is, thanks a lot, for not helping anyone out except yourselves.

It’s good to know I’m not the only moaner who finds this annoying