After an outage of multiple days, I’ve gotten sick of waiting for my del.icio.us account to return to normal so that I can post my bookmarks online. Therefore, I have I’ve switched to de.lirio.us, because (1) it’s currently operating, (2) it runs on completely open source software, and (3) it has this nifty “@private tag” feature, which allows you to hide certain bookmarks from the public eye. Del.icio.us lacks all 3 features.

If you know me, feature #2 is key. It means that I could theoretically run my own installation of the same software that runs de.lirio.us. It’s called Rubric, and it is released under the GPL. I’m not sure I have the expertise or server space to install it, but it’s the thought that counts.

The absence of feature #3 means that I’ve been putting my private bookmarks in my browser, where they are inaccessible from other computers and vulnerable to a hard drive crash. My private bookmarks include sites which I don’t want to show up in Google, surprises that I am planning for friends, and links which just aren’t relevant to outsiders (e.g. the directions to where I am going tonight). I’m sure you all have your own uses for private bookmarks…

At any rate, as soon as del.icio.us gets back up I’m going to try to run the Del2Del perl script to import my bookmarks from del.icio.us to de.lirio.us, and reduce my dependency on proprietary software.