Delicious never seemed to live up to its potential and keep up with the pace of innovation on the web, but I still liked using the site. It was hard not to be nervous about it though given it seemed like it was always priority 999 in Yahoo’s web strategy. Between that feeling and my increasing trust issues with any service that is totally cloud-based¹, I decided to abandon my use of it a couple months ago. Instead, I began to store all of my bookmarks in Yojimbo, and I can’t say I have looked back once.

When I made the move, I checked out a couple of the Delicious to Yojimbo scripts that are out there on the web, but I never did a full import of everything because the scripts only got me 90% of what I wanted. I have had on my someday / maybe list to write a better Applescript for the import, but haven’t done it yet. I suppose that just got moved up on the priority list.

That said, I’d recommend if you have anything on Delicious, you do what I did tonight and get a full XML dump of your Delicious bookmarks. It might take all of 60 seconds.

It’s pretty simple. Just drop into Terminal and execute the following command (replacing yourusername and yourpassword with your individual info, of course):

    curl -u yourusername:yourpassword  https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all > delicious-bookmarks.xml

That will give you everything from your Delicious account in one XML file that can be parsed at will in the future.

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I am certainly a little late to the party but had to mention that I’ve really been enjoying Dan Benjamin’s podcast, The Pipeline, of late. The Pipeline is a podcast he started earlier this year that, “is an interview show, featuring in-depth conversations with innovators, designers, geeks, newsmakers, entrepreneurs, and people who create amazing things,” and is part of his new 5by5 network.

I’ve been working my way through The Pipeline during my daily commute, and my faves so far have to be Episode 7: Merlin Mann, which is a healthy dose of… well Merlin being Merlin, and Episode 8: Jason Kottke, which is an interesting discussion of the life of a professional blogger.

Check it out.

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As I mentioned in a previous post, Safari on the iPad supports bookmarklets in the Bookmarks Bar.  If you’re looking to add the “Share on Tumblr” bookmarklet, I don’t believe Tumblr has an updated Goodies page that lets you drag the bookmarklet straight to the iPad Bookmarks Bar.  So here’s how to do it:

1. Create a bookmark in Safari (it can be any page) and name it “Share on Tumblr”.  Save it in the Bookmarks Bar” folder.
2. Edit the bookmark and delete what is currently in the address field.
3. Copy this Tumblr javascript code from Safari on your iPad, and then paste it into the address field.
4. Save the bookmark.

The process is a little cumbersome, but once you understand the concept keep in mind that you can do it for any bookmarklet.

Google would have been far better off launching Buzz as a standalone application. Make it invite only to start, and every single one of the early adopters would be begging to get it. A couple of weeks later give them an option of adding Buzz to their Gmail flow, and most would probably do it and call Google brilliant for thinking that one up. Then slowly bring other users on board over time, as they hear about it and want in. Fast forward a year from now and tens of millions of people may happily be using Google Buzz in their Gmail.

Arrington nails it.

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Ok.  Last one (for now at least!).  Here’s the syntax to put in a LaunchBar search template for Twitter’s “Find People” search:

http://twitter.com/search/users?q=*&category=people&source=users

I just set up a LaunchBar search template for Twitter.  It is easy.  Just follow the same procedure I outlined in my post on setting up a LaunchBar search template for Gmail, but use the following search string instead:

http://twitter.com/#search?q=*

This just saved me a ton of time!

My personal email account definitely got away from me over the last few months.  I went from a fairly disciplined Inbox Zero type of system to a semi-permanent state of emergency scanning.  This past weekend, I put in a couple hours and was able to reclaim my inbox and do a pretty thorough clean-up.

As I did this I was surprised to realize that Gmail does not have a one-click way to view all unread items in your inbox.  Instead, you have to enter a query in the Gmail search box to do it.

The syntax is straightforward, but I’m not sure it is formally documented anywhere, so here it is in case you ever need to use it:

label:inbox label:unread

As you know over the past couple of months we have been working on the new features for WordPress 2.9. We have also been working on trying to make WordPress as secure as possible and during this process we have identified a number of security hardening changes that we thought were worth back-porting to the 2.8 branch so as to get these improvements out there and make all your sites as secure as possible.

If you run a WordPress blog, you’ll want to update.

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Here's what the rssCloud element looks like in this blog's RSS feed.

The tech story of last weekend was probably that WordPress installations around the world got hit by a nasty worm, so it was nice to see today that WordPress bounced back with an announcement that wordpress.com now supports rssCloud, a real-time update feature of  RSS developed by Dave Winer.  That was quickly followed by Joseph Scott’s release of an rssCloud plug-in for self-hosted WordPress installations.

Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb summarizes today’s news in a recent post, and in the process has a great analogy of why rssCloud matters:

“This is like the difference between checking your email every once in awhile and using a Blackberry to get new emails pushed to you as soon as they arrive. The subscription method of RSSCloud works more like Instant Messaging than the old method of polling feeds for updates each time you fire up your feed reader.”

I installed the rssCloud plug-in on the blog tonight, and it couldn’t have been easier.  I’m looking forward to see how fast RSS readers adopt this protocol as well as the impact it has on the “real-time web”.

You may have noticed that a number of older posts from this summer hit the blog and the RSS feed yesterday. After taking a temporary break from posting on this blog to experiment for the last month or so with Posterous, I decided to merge the majority of the content I had posted there into this site.

Posterous is a very cool service that is only getting better every day, but I’m still debating how I am going to use it on an ongoing basis.  Moving forward this site will be my primary location for content.