undelicious
I’ve finally given up on del.icio.us and switched to Yahoo! My Web 2.0. Mostly, I was sick of being limited to 255 character descriptions, but Yahoo also offers to cache a copy of the page when you save it, which is cool. Linkrot no more.
So I had to rewrite my WordPress del.icio.us importer plugin for My Web 2.0. Notes:
- Yahoo web services send dates as Unix timestamps in Sunnyvale time… kind of strange (and also, the timezone issue is undocumented). I guess this is the lowest common denominator of time representations, and therefore probably supported in an arbitrary language?
- They have an importer for del.icio.us links which seems to work as advertised, except that imported links accessed through the API return the time of import, rather than the original time of creation (on del.icio.us). That’s not unreasonable, except that it shows the original del.icio.us creation date in the actual app. Holy inconsistent behavior, Batman!
- PHP date/time functions do automatic timezone conversion if you have your timezone set in the environment, which is really nuts. You can put a timezone-agnostic Unix timestamp into date() and get a string out that’s a couple hours later. This reminds me a lot of gpc_magic_quotes… A little useful for novices, a lot annoying for experts.
- Why is it so difficult to get a permalink to your page in a lot of Yahoo apps? I had to send an invite email to myself to figure out my friendid, which is GDsGTFXF4ulazZqVVB5GDu4-. Hooray, that’s easy to remember. Why not use usernames? And make the URL displayed in the browser something useful? A URL-saving web app should have URLs that are savable.
- It strips HTML tags from the “note” field. Oops, I kind of need that. For now I’ve resorted to using Textile (which looks pretty ugly and unsemantic on my links page).