Migrating from Delicious to Pinboard

Yahoo is shutting down Delicious. I’ve been using Delicious to share links with friends for years, so this is not a good development from my perspective.

The Metafilter discussion about possible alternatives points out Unalog, Pinboard, Diigo, and a few others. I took a look and decided that Pinboard is the best bet. What I like best is that it has a business model — selling a cheap permanent membership. I like things with business models because I think they are less likely to shut down.

There’ve been several shutdowns of free services this year — Xmarks went out of business (but were rescued by Lastpass), Ask.com killed Bloglines, Oracle is doing it’s best to kill MySQL, and now Yahoo is killing Delicious.

Migration

I found it very easy to migrate from Delicious to Pinboard.

1. Open a Pinboard account
2. Export your Delicious bookmarks
3. Import your Delicious bookmarks
4. Wait for Pinboard to catch up with all Delicious users importing their bookmarks at the same time
5. Use Twitterfeed to set up automatic reposting to Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Just like Delicious, Pinboard has lots of handy bookmarklets.

Remove Facebook suggestions

One of the Facebook annoyances that cannot be disabled is the list of people that you don’t want to friend and whose walls you don’t want to write on that is in the the top right corner of its front page.

It’s easy to hide this impertinent design element.

On Firefox, you should install the Stylish extension.

On other browsers, you should follow the respective instructions.

Once you have Stylish installed:
1. Go to Facebook
2. Click on the Stylish icon in the status bar
3. Choose Write new style > For facebook.com

In the dialog:
1. Name the new style “Facebook”
2. Paste in the following code:

#pymk_hp_box {
display:none !important;
}

You should be able to save now and no longer be subjected to the Facebook Suggestions box. Unfortunately, this code may not survive the inevitable Facebook layout change.

Technical note: The wrapping code that you see in the screenshot above was generated by Stylish and will likely only work in Firefox. If you wish to adapt it in a different browser, you may want to replace the @-moz-document with @-o-document (for Opera), @-webkit-document (for Safari and Chrome), or @document once CSS3 is ratified and vendor-specific implementations merge.

Links

- Stylish extension for Firefox
- UserStyles.org
- About.com on user stylesheets (somewhat old)

Some Facebook network stats

I’m part of three Facebook networks, and I’ve been keeping track of their size since May of this year.

Toronto has gone from 600k people in May to 800k people in September. That’s 32% of the municipality or 16% of the metropolitan area, which is an impressive proportion.

University of Toronto has been stable at 55k, but there should be a flurry of new users in September when first-year students get their UofT email addresses.

The population of IBMers on Facebook has actually declined. Conversely, I suspect our population on LinkedIn, a career-oriented networking site, has not.