Never get in the way of people trying to give you money

March 8, 2011 6:58 PM

Anatomy of a Crushing: Imagine you're a relatively small company (Pinboard) and news leaks that your vastly larger competitor (Delicious) might be about to disappear. A huge bonanza? Sure, if you can keep the site running under traffic that's suddenly 20 times higher than normal. (previously) (via)
posted by Horace Rumpole (21 comments total)

Are there any delicious like services that you can run on your own server?
posted by delmoi at 7:12 PM on March 8, 2011

Scripted FTP of bookmarks.html, delmoi?

Traditional, basic, but works. It just depends if you want social sharing stuff.
posted by jaduncan at 7:15 PM on March 8, 2011

This type of rapid expansion is pretty much what Amazon Web Services is for.
posted by jaduncan at 7:16 PM on March 8, 2011 [1 favorite]

delmoi, start here.
posted by vidur at 7:17 PM on March 8, 2011 [2 favorites]

Frankly, I've always used a manual sync. This story actually illustrates one of my complaints with SaaS: the "mass delicious exodus." Why put a huge portion of my data at the mercy of that, when I can duplicate it with a $20/month VPS (which does fifty other things for me) and a script?
posted by sonic meat machine at 7:18 PM on March 8, 2011

You can actually get an Amazon 'micro' EC2 instance for just $54 a year now.
posted by delmoi at 7:31 PM on March 8, 2011 [1 favorite]

I should look into that. Currently, though, I use a Linode for some development/testing work as well as my scripts (like syncing) and a little bit of instruction. I'm not that familiar with the Amazon system.
posted by sonic meat machine at 7:35 PM on March 8, 2011

I find myself using Pinboard regularly, while I don't think I logged into Delicious within a month of setting up an account there back in the day.

Partly it's because there's a nice, lightweight Safari plugin for Pinboard that makes bookmarking pretty convenient, and partly because the Pinboard UI is more to my liking.

No real complaints, although I always find it odd that I can see who are bookmarking popular things, and that I can subscribe to others' accounts, but I can't see who's subscribing to mine.
posted by ardgedee at 7:47 PM on March 8, 2011

This article is fantastic. I like this new thing of web companies publishing how their system architecture works and performs. GitHub had a nice architecture post 18 months ago, there's others.
posted by Nelson at 7:52 PM on March 8, 2011 [1 favorite]

One thing I will give SaaS implementations: sometimes people think of creative solutions for problems I didn't know I had.

I could script syncing my bookmarks.html file between different workstations, but Pinboard can also archive every link in your bookmark history for you, so you have a snapshot of the page when you bookmarked it (for an extra fee), it also sounds like they are planning to make it possible for you to then download that archive yourself if you wish to store it locally. I have bookmarks in my list that no longer go to relevant site, usually some obscure page that documents a fix to a problem I had three years ago, and that I've now randomly come across, and now that information is possible nowhere to be found, and I just have the URL and page title to go off of to even before to start searching for it again, hoping google has it cached.

It can also add bookmarks automatically of links you post to twitter. It may take the shotgun, hoarder, approach of bookmarking, but then it also gives you the ability search and sort through it clearly. It beats my ever scrolling list of bookmarks I have right now.
posted by mrzarquon at 8:01 PM on March 8, 2011

Are there any delicious like services that you can run on your own server?

You would be looking for Joshua Schacter's original pre-Del.icio.us service Muxway, although that was never released to the public.
posted by gen at 8:08 PM on March 8, 2011

Does pinboard offer the same collective tagging and bookmarking features of delicious? I'm still holding strong with delicious, but it'll be a sad day when yahoo finally pulls the plug.
posted by stratastar at 8:17 PM on March 8, 2011

Pinboard is fucking awesome.
posted by chunking express at 8:18 PM on March 8, 2011 [1 favorite]

Good little writeup. He nicely captures one of the major hazards of an event like this, the whole hacking-it-live-and-delirious-with-exhaustion mode. I think the best technical work that happens in a lot of careers comes in those moments you can barely remember afterwards for how little sleep you got beforehand and how much you drank before you could get to sleep afterwards...
posted by brennen at 8:18 PM on March 8, 2011 [2 favorites]

Does pinboard offer the same collective tagging and bookmarking features of delicious?

I believe so—check out the tour. There are "recent," "popular," and "global tags" pages that should fit what you're looking for. The bookmarklet also offers popular tags for every page. It's billed as antisocial but works pretty well as a social service.
posted by willhopkins at 8:45 PM on March 8, 2011

Am I the only one thinking the part about modafinil in the 2008 post Maciej wrote about starting the Bedbug Registry might be relevant here as well?
posted by mediareport at 9:24 PM on March 8, 2011 [2 favorites]

You would be looking for Joshua Schacter's original pre-Del.icio.us service Muxway, although that was never released to the public.

Uh, what? If it was never released to the public, obviously I couldn't run it on my server. Scrumptious sounds most interesting because it uses really new technology (CouchDB).

What I really like about delicious is the tagging. I don't know why internal bookmarks don't have that feature in the same way.

Pinboard can also archive every link in your bookmark history for you

That's interesting. I was just thinking it would be cool to store a screenshot of everything you bookmark.
posted by delmoi at 1:35 AM on March 9, 2011

I don't know why internal bookmarks don't have that feature in the same way.

Firefox has had this for years, seriously
posted by LogicalDash at 4:31 AM on March 9, 2011

I migrated from delicious to hatena. *Warning* the site is totally in Japanese (and I don't read Japanese). It has a really good Chrome plugin & I just use the automatic Google Translate feature to find my way around. It also has a public API.
posted by lahersedor at 5:22 AM on March 9, 2011 [1 favorite]

Of course, had bedbugs been found in the Delicious offices, our server would have been doomed.
Comedic gold.
posted by ikahime at 7:22 AM on March 9, 2011

delmoi, you can reserve a micro EC2 for $54. If you want to run that instance all year it'll cost you another $61.32. (8,760 hours at $0.007 per hour)

Still, that's freakin' phenomenal and I thank you for bringing it to my attention.
posted by whuppy at 9:14 AM on March 9, 2011