Dairy Farm Daily

I have used Yahoo `My bookmarks' service before and many of my older bookmarks are still there. Recently, I have accumulated at lot of them in my local instance of Firefox and decided to merge Yahoo set with local Firefox bookmarks (which are sometimes private) and my public set of del.icio.us bookmarks. Well, today is day I abandon one more Yahoo service - at least two things are broken with Yahoo bookmarks.

First, it cannot render Russian text in folder names (which are in UFT-8 of course) - their page uses in ISO 8859-5 character set if my Yahoo language is English, and if it is is set to Russian, page is displayed in KOI8-R set.

Second, there is a limit of 1000 bookmarks and folders. I am just over 600 and I have not yet merged my del.icio.us set.

"But why would not you just put everything into del.icio.us?" - the reader can ask. Well, two reasons.
First, some of my bookmarks are private: they can have embedded usernames, or names of financial services I use, my page at various online services (like ebay), or even a random USPS tracking page. These together give enough personal information about me.
Second, I prefer folders for my bookmarks, not tags. I know that tags are all the 2.0-ness of the web, but I like to establish hierarchy of my data and follow it.

I have nothing against tags _and_ folders: for example, I can store all my links to books and films in folder and use tags with name of director or perhaps things like `unread' or `musthave'. But I want to be able to browse by bookmark type, not just search by tag.

To me, tags are bad substitute for typology of data (what is it?), private markers (displaying qualities I store) and cross-references (when I want to file thing into multiple folders.)

So why no browser I have seen has bookmark search facility, may I ask?
And what would my readers recommend as a substitute for not-so-good Yahoo bookmark facility?
Perhaps there is a way to mark del.icio.us bookmark as private? Perhaps one can make Firefox use it automatically for all bookmarks? (I know there are extensions to use del.icio.us with Firefox.)

And maybe there would be a way to make metadata private (for example, I can be ok with others seeing which films I bookmarked, but I do not want them to see my notes of people I watched them with.)

I have just broken permanent links for old entries (both of them), so instead of 14-digit timestamp they would use words from the title. I think it is for the better, and I doubt anybody have bookmarked my old entries.

As a side note, old comments courtesy of JS-Kit still work, because they still rely on old timestamp-based article identifiers.

I have also heard that my site looks horribly in Safari. I do not consider myself in any way proficient with CSS syntax and all its incompatibilities, so even though I can change it to look better on one Mac I have access to, it would probably break other browsers and other platforms. So, feel free to send me patches for single CSS style file I use -- it comes straight from nanoblogger distribution.

I have a big backlog of articles to write, so for next few monthes I would be catching up and unloading them on you. Thanks for reading!

Apart from well-known .US used by del.icio.us, there are other good top-level country code domains, potentially useful for web 2.0 sites:

.ws

used by elbo.ws (country unclear?)

.gs

used by blo.gs - now owned by Yahoo

.tf

perhaps for snprin.tf, as a special gift for Theo

.er

delegated to Eritrea - but managed by somebody in San Francisco?

.me

Allocated for Montenegro, unused in IANA whois; for all instant messaging startups (see imeem, meebo)

.id

Indonesia - rules unclear; authentication and identity services?

.th

Thailand - very strict rules; would be nice present to old Old English fans

Resources: IANA Whois | Official ISO 3166 country code list

Found two more instances of partially broken email address handling: Mailman (version 2.1.9) does not allow user+suffix@some.domain addresses in `remind me' link, and Ebay allows to add such an address, but confirmation screen does not allow it.

The real annoyance here is that it works, but up to the point. For now, I maintain about 80 (eighty!) aliases for various sites which do not allow plus signs in email addresses.

For those of you who do not know what this is for: Cyrus IMAP server uses it for automatic filing (Fastmail.FM is one commercial-grade email hosting using it). For purists: RFC822 and successors allow almost any text on left side of @-sign (even spaces if quoted.) And yes, Gmail handles it just fine.

FP!