I heard the news that Delicious was being closed sold by Yahoo.  (Which may or may not happen; if it's not sold, then I'm sure Yahoo will be shuttering the service.  Anyway, I want a backup on a different service, in case this happens.) Ok, time to panic.  I have a good 400+ bookmarks in there and didn't want to lose them.  So I started looking around for alternatives. Diigo seemed like a good alternative; I think I tried it before, but didn't find that it worked well for me, so I went back to Delicious.  Now I'm forced to switch, and I noticed that Diigo not only will import your Delicious bookmarks and tags, but it will also respect your private/public setting.  This is incredibly important to me, since I have some private bookmarks (think what you will, but I have a couple of specific sites that are tied to my computer, so I didn't want to share them).  I'm sure everyone else has private bookmarks too.  Actually the best way to keep them private is under your own profile on your own computer, but if you leave your machine running, then it's not too secure.  Having your bookmarks on a site gives you some cross-platform and browser syncing without needing a special plugin for your browser (xmarks, chrome sync, etc). I looked into Pinboard.in, but I wasn't sure if it'd work for me, and I didn't want to be stuck with a service I paid for and wasn't happy with.  Mister Wong looked interesting, but I think I prefer the way Diigo works.  Has anyone who reads this blog tried Mister Wong or Pinboard.in and do you like it? The import finally finished the other day, and I was able to start working with Diigo, and I really like it.  The sharing options don't seem to be as prevalent on Diigo, but I think that's ok.  I'm sharing with Friendfeed, but not twitter, though I can easily set that up through twitterfeed.  They have a Chrome extension that I do like. Diigo also has many features that I'm intrigued with trying out: highlighting, read later (though I'll probably stick with Instapaper), and stickynote.  I generally use Evernote for online notes or Tomboy for offline notes (synced with Dropbox), but I might give this a shot. I'm really liking this service, but I'm still going to save bookmarks to my browser and sync them through Google Chrom/ium's browser sync.  I learned my lesson with Delicious!

I read a lot of articles, and sometimes I don't really have time at that moment to read some of the longer ones (like ones I get through NYTimes, or editorials). I've tried different approaches to dealing with articles to read later, but since I have two computers, I like them to be in sync with each other. I at first tried a "read later" tag on delicious, but it didn't work for me, as I didn't revisit the tag later. Didn't work at all. Then I tried the "read it later" plugin for Firefox. It just basically plopped a folder on your computer that was called "read it later" and had a web component for syncing. I didn't really like that either. I've decided on using Instapaper and Readability in conjunction with Google Chrome/ium on both Windows and Ubuntu. I use Instapaper through Shareaholic, but they have a very simple bookmarklet to save stuff to the default folder under your account. Yes, this requires an account, but I think it's totally worth it, as you can sync articles between all your browsers, and they're not tied to just one browser or computer. Readability is a great bookmarklet that strips all the ads, graphics and everythign else that pulls your attention away from the text. I love it with longer articles, and some shorter articles. It doesn't really work with an article that relies on pictures and graphs to illustrate it's point, but it does a great job with just text. I'm not advocating killing all ads (though I use adthwart) and graphics, but sometimes you just want to read something and not be bothered by graphics and fancy CSS stuff on a website. Both of these bookmarklets "just work". That's something that usually doesn't happen, but in this case they do, and they do very well. Try it out. Next time you don't have time to read a huge article, try out Instapaper to save it and Readability to actually read it. You'll get through it faster than you would on the website.