Those of you who subscribe to The MKX® (via email or RSS) or pay attention to that list of links on the website’s sidebar know that I’ve been using a service called Delicious for link sharing. I started in 2005 back when they were known as Web 2.0 pioneers “del.icio.us”. I’m stopping now.
Delicious was a great, promising service for “Social Bookmarking”. They were “cool”. Then Yahoo bought it in their own desperate bid for relevance only to proceed to neglect it almost to the point of irrelevance. So they sold it to AVOS Systems, who then sold it to Science Inc. I don’t know who either is.
In the meantime, the website improved somewhat, an unusable iPhone app was released – not in the sense that it was hard to use but in the sense that it truly didn’t work at all, and the bookmarklet stopped working. The latest owners, before making any improvements, decided to stick ads to user’s RSS feeds without any warning. Monetizing is fine but not warning your users before such change is not. This was the straw. I myself subscribe to Delicious feeds for about 7 people who share maybe one link every six months. Yet I get one ad foe each of them daily!
So I decided to make a change. Introducing:
I am using a OSS system called Shaarli. I am self-hosting it which means that it cannot get sold to Yahoo without making me rich. Right now, I’m using the stock version, which sports a design only a mother could love. That’s ok – if I find time for it I may tweak it to be less offensive. All 1875 links were imported. Getting a combined RSS feed for The MKX® and The MKX® Links wasn’t so easy. I used ChimpFeedr (by MailChimp), then I put that through FeedBurner (which gives me both usage statistics and the email subscription service and risks joining Google’s Graveyard at any point). I hope it works out.
In the meantime, I apologize for any ads or RSS oddness. Let me know of any problems.