Ma.gnolia as a del.icio.us alternative

Don't get me started on weird period-ized names.

As I've written about previously, social bookmarking hasn't advanced a whole lot. Frankly, I don't care a whole lot about the social aspect beyond maybe keeping an eye on the links of a few friends who I know turn up interesting stuff. However, I've found that keeping my bookmarks in the Cloud rather than in my browser works well for me. Doing a daily link post with some short commentary also fits my style and workflow better than doing a lot of short posts does.

My latest experiment is with Ma.gnolia.com. It's pretty, but probably its biggest advantage in my book is that it doesn't truncate the description (i.e. the comment or excerpt that I enter) like del.icio.us does. Although del.icio.us's limited character count does encourage a certain twitter-ish brevity, which is probably good discipline for me, I do find it annoying. You also don't get to see what is actually being truncated until you save it.

Ma.gnolia.com has its own application programming interface (API) to interact with the service. However, it also supports an API and other access methods that mirror those in de.licio.us. Thus, with minor (but hard to figure out from the documentation) modifications, I was able to use the same javascript that I use to generate my daily link post from del.icio.us with Ma.gnolia.

The one big downside that I've run into so far is that, although Ma.gnolia claims to import from del.icio.us, it's not clear the import works--at least for large bookmark collections. I fired off the import two days ago and, while it claims to be in process, it hasn't completed yet. I probably won't use the service if I can't, in practice, move my bookmarks over.

(Programming hint. If you've used the JSON approach with del.icio.us to read your bookmarks, the equivalent magic incantation with Ma.gnolia should contain http://ma.gnolia.com/json/mirrord/people/USERNAME )