Lee Nau

I am a big fan of Delicious and have been using it for about 7 years. Delicious was acquired by Yahoo a number of years ago and, in December, Yahoo decided to sunset the site. An outcry went out on the internet while the users scrambled to find a new home for their shared bookmarks.

I have almost ten thousand links in my delicious account. I was overjoyed to hear recently that the cofounders of YouTube had bought Delicious from Yahoo in April. Until yesterday, when I’d send my links to delicious, I would still see the Yahoo user interface. Last evening, my account switched over to the new AVOS delicious look and feel.

I’ve since bookmarked a few dozen links, mainly via Pukka, and wanted to make the following notes.

1. The new look is clean and really easy to use. Unfortunately, it doesn’t yet seem to have an option for viewing more than 10 links per page or getting a smaller view.
2. If I select a tag, I get the first 10 links, but can’t page back to see earlier items with that tag. I read a lot of RSS feeds that deal with lifehacks. The page back functionality is really important and I hope it reappears soon.
3. The old delicious would show me a complete list of the tags I’ve used. This version shows 50 of them in a sidebar without the option to see all. Again, this functionality is pretty important and I hope it makes its way back.
4. When tagging something via Pukka, whether I’m separating tags with commas or spaces, multiple tags get consolidated on the delicious website. In order to fix the tags, I have to come in afterward and manually edit the bookmark on the site. Until this is fixed, it’s clunky to use multiple tags on the same item, unless you’re using the bookmarklet.
5. I’m not sure how the new Stacks are better than narrowing lists of links through tag filtering (i.e.: awesome+useful+resources). I’ll probably use stacks as a “Best of My Delicious” feature.

Since I mostly use NetNewsWire to read RSS feeds and Pukka to post links to my delicious account, this multiple tag issue is pretty important to me. I also like to go through long lists, which sometimes involves scrolling through pages and pages of saved links in the same manner of going through the used bin at a record store. You never know what you’ll find in those stacks.

I’m really excited about a new Delicious. They’ve put a lot of work into saving this incredible service and reconstructing the old codebase into something that will attract an entirely new audience. I’m looking forward to seeing what the future holds, particularly as I approach my 10000th link. I just hope some of the five things above get addressed, or at least answered.

Thanks, Chad and Steve, for saving one of my favorite web sites.

Thanks, Larry Pruett. I think I’m starting to understand Design Patterns from the perspective of PHP. A lot of this is still kind of cryptic to me, but if I enter in the source code manually and examine it over and over again, perhaps it will prepare me for my project to read Design Patterns(book) by the Gang of Four. I want to see if I can figure out how to use the design patterns in Ruby and JavaScript as well.

The source examples in PHP, though, are great. I’m learning a lot, even just by typing the examples in and getting them to run. If only the left shift key worked better on this keyboard. Maybe I’d better dig around and find a better one.

Yesterday, Brent Simmons announced that NetNewsWire, my favorite RSS Reader, is being released for free download. Along with NetNewsWire, which won my RSS reader roundup a couple of months ago, NewsGator has released all their RSS readers for free.

It seems like an excellent time to update to NetNewsWire 3.1. Congratulations to Brent, Greg, and Nick. Well done, gentlemen.