Related link: http://del.icio.us
If you haven’t heard, del.icio.us has been toast for multiple days. Looks likes a confluence of events (and this is a guess based on the blog post): power failure caused RAID to corrupt some files, that corrupted data happened to be a replicated master database, and the slave databases faithfully copied said corruption. Can’t fault them for that, but I’m sure they will mark it up as a lesson learned. When you are using RAID, make sure to invest in redundant power supplies and have sufficient battery backup to power down in a controlled fashion. If anyone from del.icio.us is reading this, a detailed forensic failure analysis would be very helpful to the community. Read on for more about my own del.icio.us withdrawl…
Anyone else suffering from del.icio.us withdrawl?
This outage has made me resolve to make backups of every single online tool I use. If basecamp bites the dust, I can at least write an XSLT against the XML dump to generate some insert statements and cobble together a half-way decent project planning tool. I automate a nightly basecamp export, and I’m getting ready to do the same for del.icio.us and possibly some sort of incremental backup of Flickr photos. That way, if del.icio.us suffers another MySQL crippling, RAID-corrupting power failure. I’ll at least have a way to get the bookmarks I’ve come to rely on like a crutch.
There are some alternatives, but they lack the openness of del.icio.us. I’ve tried out Furl.net today, and while the interface looks great, I don’t see any way to embed Furl data in another web site. And, on top of that, I’m tied to del.icio.us because they’ve got my data.
Scuttle
The last day or so could have been really tough. del.icio.us had become a big part of how I did things.
About a week ago I was thinking how much it would suck if something happened to del.icio.us. So a crude wget script was born to backup my bookmarks. It was scheduled to run automatically.
When del.icio.us went down at least there was an xml file with my bookmarks. Between building a stylesheet and looking for alternatives I came across Scuttle.org
A half hour after downloading it to the Fedora box it had my bookmarks imported. While Scuttle is not quite del.icio.us I was able to get back to work.
It's back...
Once again we have bookmarking (http://del.icio.us)
sustainable internet services
The life time and longterm perspective of free Internet services seems always a bit of a problem. This rises the question why we don't have community supported Internet services with a membership and a fee but without the fear that it will soon become part of another big corporation.
A few more thoughts about this at
http://tdot.blog-city.com/yahoo_delicious.htm
Kurt Cagle raised similar questions in his recent article Open Standards and Organic Foods:
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/8881
It that something we should think about? And try to establish?