That was what happened with the State Library’s Family History Bookmarks, within 24 hours of the changes to Delicious and without prior preparation, I had a customised version of Semantic Scuttle up and running.

The first service the State Library used for it’s bookmarks was Magnolia. When disaster struck, we recovered as many bookmarks as possible and shifted to Delicious. Fully expecting a service run by Yahoo, to be reliable and stable. But just incase we automated backups the bookmarks.

When Yahoo announced they where selling Delicious, we did some investigations of the alternatives including Diigo and Scuttle. But as the likely purchasers indicated they would not significantly change Delicious. We decided to stick with Delicious, knowing that with our regular backups and import opportunities offer by other services, we could have an alternative up and running quickly. Which we did.

Why Semantic Scuttle, two reasons:

1. Hosted in house we have full control, and after Magnolia and Delicious, the key users wanted that security.
2. Tag clouds, they might be passe for most, but to navigate a large number of family history resources, they just work and Semantic Scuttle has some nice options buried under the hood.

So why am I writing this too weeks after the changes to Delicious and creating the solution. Well like a typical web geek, work was nice and easy. My own bookmarks, where in a little worse state, I had not backed them up for months, so it took a little to get myself to get motivated and organised to create my own personal bookmarking service, bookmarks.nickcowie.com.

Still a few things to do, upgrading the sidebar on this blog (though as usual I am threatening to rebuild the whole blog). Look at modifying the Delicious plugin for Firefox to see if it will work with Semantic Scuttle, amongst others, but in the meantime I will use the bookmarklet.

Boilerplate is not a template or framework, just a set of tools to get that site developed quickly. I know I will be making use of most of it in the near future.

I do not want to track your every mouse move, click or keystroke on this site, I know what most the problems are with this site and will fix it with the next redesign. What I really want to do is have a good look at RobotReplay, because it could be very useful for a couple of upcoming projects.

Let me know if you experience any problems using this site over the next few days, I would like to see if there any performance issues.

Hat tip Tara Hunt

Modified Andrew’s javascript bookmarklet, found the del.icio.us javascript feed details and it was dead easy to generate two feeds from del.icio.us, Worth Reading which includes the notes field from del.icio.us so I can add my thoughts to links I think should be shared and Commented On a simple list of the last few comments I made.

The two bookmarklets, sitting in my bookmarks toolbar folder, making it so easy to tag a page I commented on, or tag a page to share. Even have an Worth Reading feed

Only downside is that I was looking to move from del.icio.us to simpy because simpy tag’s are comma delimited, not space delimited as del.icio.us. Unfortunately if was five minutes to do this with del.icio.us and a lot longer with simpy. Still all is not lost I will use simpy to backup my del.icio.us bookmarks as simpy has a synchronization with del.icio.us feature, just in case disaster strikes or I learn how to use simpy.

Update 13 January looks like there is a problem at del.icio.us with their javascript feeds. I have done a number of updates in the last 48 hours and while they appear in my del.icio.us RSS feed, they do not appear in my del.icio.us javascript feed.

Update 15 January, the problem appears to be caching of the javascript feed from del.icio.us, if I look at: < a href=“http://del.icio.us/feeds/json/nickcow/blogit?count=5″>http://del.icio.us/feeds/json/nickcow/blogit?count=5 I see only one entry, yet if I change the 5 to a 4 http://del.icio.us/feeds/json/nickcow/blogit?count=4 I see all my recent entries. Time to think of a plan B.

Update 8 February: the caching problem seems to of been resolved, don’t know what or where, but it has been running smoothly for more than a week now.

Richard Rutter is taking Robert Bringhurst’s classic book The Elements of Typographic Style and applying it to the web. Only six small sections so far, but I have learnt a few things already.

And when I say anybody who works with HTML and CSS needs to know more about typography on the web, I mean it. There are very few sites that impress me with their typography, yet I can pick up almost any magazine (ok except Desktop their type choice with the latest redesign do not appeal to me) and be happy with the typography. Sure they are totally different formats and print has a solid typographical history. But type on the web can be good, for example Richard Rutter’s, Mark Boulton’s and Jason Santa Maria’s blogs, it just seem’s very few other people understand type on the web, the way print designers understand type on paper.

Found via Carson Systems Blog

Added 1420 hours 23 December, the HTML that Performancing adds is not perfect, it is valid XHTML as far as I can see, though I am not happy with how it does it.

OSIG the Online Service Interest Group, a Western Australian list mainly used to distribute job listings in the State Government sector, however, things may change in the next wek or so once a forum is launched:
http://www.dpc.wa.gov.au/psmd/osig/osig.html

AGIMO, the Australian Government Information Management Office have a number of specialist mailing lists (all low volume).
http://www.lists.agimo.gov.au/mailman/listinfo

Intranet Peers, run by James Robertson of Step Two Design requires a Yahoo login and a public-sector (.gov or .ed) or non-profit organisations email address to join. If you are involved in intranets, it is worthwhile for just the resources alone, which include screen shots of over 40 government intranets.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/intranet-peers/