An open letter to Delicious, or, what the fuck where you thinking?
Being a comprehensive list of the things Delicious has done to piss me off. In this post: screengrabs, ranting, and cattiness; my addiction to slash is laid bare; I accidentally reveal that I still use Hotmail. This post was intended as informative and comes across - I think - as about half informative and half plain old moaning, so, yeah, bear that in mind.
Firstly, when I click the Delicious button in my browser, I'm now taken to the Delicious homepage, rather than my own list of links. A small but annoying inconvenience. Secondly, the new layout, with slightly larger text but LOADS MORE WHITE SPACE, is fugly. Perhaps this is an accessibility thing - but if so, then I'm left wondering why the background is still glaring white, for instance, and why predictive search has disappeared.
More significantly, the Firefox Delicious plugin intially wasn't working. A fix has now been posted on the Delicious status update blog, but this fix essentially involves deleting a lot of the other saved information my browser stores. Put simply, making the Firefox add-on for Delicious work involves automatically logging out of Twitter, Gmail, Facebook, Livejournal, Tumblr, Etsy, Hotmail, the Guardian, b3ta, Disqus and countless other web services. Using one web service should not affect my usage of other unrelated ones.
(As as aside, the blog claims that this solution was devised by Delicious' chief engineer. Seriously? Either they're lying or they are in serious need of a more competent chief engineer.)
Nonetheless, I worked through the solution posted in order to continue using the right-click-save method of bookmarking; going to the main Delicious site each time was already, after a day, becoming a hassle. There are further problems with this, though, and I will come back to them shortly.
For now, though, let's look at my main page. This screengrab (click for bigger) shows all the tags I'm able to access with a click:
These tags are in no semblance of order: they aren't sorted alphabetically or by use. In fact, there are several tags that have only ever been used once ("abusive", for instance, has only been used a single time). There are also new tags I didn't create - "has:pairing" and "has:fandom." I can see that tags like that might actually be useful - if I wanted to differentiate between gen and pairing-based fic in my bookmarks, perhaps. However, clicking on either of those only brings up four recently-bookmarked fics, all the same pairing and fandom.
And meanwhile, many of my most-used tags seem to have disappeared altogether. As an example, let's look at my "pairing:arthur/eames" tag. This is one of my most frequently used tags, and the pairing I have bookmarked most often, around 150 times over the course of a year or so (in terms of bookmarking if not other activity, Inception was one of my most actively-participated-in fandoms). It's missing from the list of clickable tags available on the right-hand side of the page, and nothing on the first page contains it, so I'm unable to click it.
There is a search box at the top of the page, but the predictive search function that used to exist has gone, so I have to remember exactly what I called each tag I've used. (This also means I can't browse my own tags any more, maybe looking for pairings I'd forgotten I bookmarked.) In this case, at least, it's relatively easy to remember what I named the tag - the only tricky part is remembering which way around the names go. So let's try a search!
And just like magic, they've disappeared!
The Firefox plugin seems to believe they still exist, though, If I try bookmarking a page, the tag appears in the list...
(Incidentally, when I started writing this post, this was displaying 100 uses, and I was all ready to rant about that, but it looks as if that's been fixed, so I'm not going to complain about that, and I applaud that they've done so. It also seems that the issue of using the / character has been fixed too.)
Anyway, if I bookmark this way, then go back to my main page, the tag appears on the topmost link. I can then click it to access more posts with that tag (click for bigger)...
Which brings us to another issue. Only ten links are currently displayed for each tag. Unless I've used very, very specific tags to the extent that no more than ten links have exactly the same tags, I have effectively lost those bookmarks.
I've used a fandom example here, but the truth is that Delicious is useful to me in so many other ways. When I wrote my MSc dissertation - in which I analysed a corpus I found online - I was able to bookmark materials as I found them, both academic references and the corpus itself. I use Delicious for keeping track of craft resources - knitting and sewing patterns, sources of materials, tutorials, things that assist me in selling. I bookmark recipes by type of cuisine, ingredients, and cooking techniques, in case I need inspiration. Having a single place online where all this is kept has been a godsend.
I also want to note that I haven't gone into the other ways Delicous has been used - in particular, the issue of bundles, and of browsing tags for a particular pairing etc - mainly because I haven't, personally, used these features much, so I'm not in a place to comment. I'm sure other people have done a better job than I could (links welcome). The point is, they've been removed, like other features, without warning, thereby making things more difficult. It's times like this I'm thankful I've never got involved in running a newsletter or recsletter.
As I've mentioned, some of the features or lack thereof have been fixed since the new release, so I have hope that these issues will be ironed out. In a way that's only part of the point, though; these changes should have been beta-tested, not flung out without warning. And I'm sure people will say well, it's a free service, you had warning a changeover was coming, find somewhere else, and so on. (I answer these criticisms with the very mature and intelligent - it's my LJ and I can say what I like. Mainly because I haven't had a coffee and I don't have the energy to answer them right now, although if you have anything to add please do so in comments and I'll come to them later when I am fully caffeinated.)
Firstly, when I click the Delicious button in my browser, I'm now taken to the Delicious homepage, rather than my own list of links. A small but annoying inconvenience. Secondly, the new layout, with slightly larger text but LOADS MORE WHITE SPACE, is fugly. Perhaps this is an accessibility thing - but if so, then I'm left wondering why the background is still glaring white, for instance, and why predictive search has disappeared.
More significantly, the Firefox Delicious plugin intially wasn't working. A fix has now been posted on the Delicious status update blog, but this fix essentially involves deleting a lot of the other saved information my browser stores. Put simply, making the Firefox add-on for Delicious work involves automatically logging out of Twitter, Gmail, Facebook, Livejournal, Tumblr, Etsy, Hotmail, the Guardian, b3ta, Disqus and countless other web services. Using one web service should not affect my usage of other unrelated ones.
(As as aside, the blog claims that this solution was devised by Delicious' chief engineer. Seriously? Either they're lying or they are in serious need of a more competent chief engineer.)
Nonetheless, I worked through the solution posted in order to continue using the right-click-save method of bookmarking; going to the main Delicious site each time was already, after a day, becoming a hassle. There are further problems with this, though, and I will come back to them shortly.
For now, though, let's look at my main page. This screengrab (click for bigger) shows all the tags I'm able to access with a click:
These tags are in no semblance of order: they aren't sorted alphabetically or by use. In fact, there are several tags that have only ever been used once ("abusive", for instance, has only been used a single time). There are also new tags I didn't create - "has:pairing" and "has:fandom." I can see that tags like that might actually be useful - if I wanted to differentiate between gen and pairing-based fic in my bookmarks, perhaps. However, clicking on either of those only brings up four recently-bookmarked fics, all the same pairing and fandom.
And meanwhile, many of my most-used tags seem to have disappeared altogether. As an example, let's look at my "pairing:arthur/eames" tag. This is one of my most frequently used tags, and the pairing I have bookmarked most often, around 150 times over the course of a year or so (in terms of bookmarking if not other activity, Inception was one of my most actively-participated-in fandoms). It's missing from the list of clickable tags available on the right-hand side of the page, and nothing on the first page contains it, so I'm unable to click it.
There is a search box at the top of the page, but the predictive search function that used to exist has gone, so I have to remember exactly what I called each tag I've used. (This also means I can't browse my own tags any more, maybe looking for pairings I'd forgotten I bookmarked.) In this case, at least, it's relatively easy to remember what I named the tag - the only tricky part is remembering which way around the names go. So let's try a search!
And just like magic, they've disappeared!
The Firefox plugin seems to believe they still exist, though, If I try bookmarking a page, the tag appears in the list...
(Incidentally, when I started writing this post, this was displaying 100 uses, and I was all ready to rant about that, but it looks as if that's been fixed, so I'm not going to complain about that, and I applaud that they've done so. It also seems that the issue of using the / character has been fixed too.)
Anyway, if I bookmark this way, then go back to my main page, the tag appears on the topmost link. I can then click it to access more posts with that tag (click for bigger)...
Which brings us to another issue. Only ten links are currently displayed for each tag. Unless I've used very, very specific tags to the extent that no more than ten links have exactly the same tags, I have effectively lost those bookmarks.
I've used a fandom example here, but the truth is that Delicious is useful to me in so many other ways. When I wrote my MSc dissertation - in which I analysed a corpus I found online - I was able to bookmark materials as I found them, both academic references and the corpus itself. I use Delicious for keeping track of craft resources - knitting and sewing patterns, sources of materials, tutorials, things that assist me in selling. I bookmark recipes by type of cuisine, ingredients, and cooking techniques, in case I need inspiration. Having a single place online where all this is kept has been a godsend.
I also want to note that I haven't gone into the other ways Delicous has been used - in particular, the issue of bundles, and of browsing tags for a particular pairing etc - mainly because I haven't, personally, used these features much, so I'm not in a place to comment. I'm sure other people have done a better job than I could (links welcome). The point is, they've been removed, like other features, without warning, thereby making things more difficult. It's times like this I'm thankful I've never got involved in running a newsletter or recsletter.
As I've mentioned, some of the features or lack thereof have been fixed since the new release, so I have hope that these issues will be ironed out. In a way that's only part of the point, though; these changes should have been beta-tested, not flung out without warning. And I'm sure people will say well, it's a free service, you had warning a changeover was coming, find somewhere else, and so on. (I answer these criticisms with the very mature and intelligent - it's my LJ and I can say what I like. Mainly because I haven't had a coffee and I don't have the energy to answer them right now, although if you have anything to add please do so in comments and I'll come to them later when I am fully caffeinated.)