del.icio.us / blog

do you have anything to declare?

We’ve just rolled out our import tool.  You can now import your existing bookmarks from Firefox, IE, Safari, Opera, or anything that supports the traditional Netscape bookmark file format.  If you like, we can even give you a bit of a jump-start by automatically applying the most popular tags.  To try it out, click on "settings", then "import".

For most users the import is pretty quick.  If you have a large number of browser bookmarks it might take some time to process; once it starts, you can leave the import page and come back later to check the status.

We took our time on this one because we wanted to make sure that your privacy was protected.  After all, your browser bookmarks and favorites have been private up till now, and nobody wants to see all those Brangelina articles you saved, anyway. So when you import your bookmarks into del.icio.us we will mark everything as “not shared”.  You are free to share them at any time – in fact, we encourage you to do so.  Sharing is really what this site is about, after all.

private saving ryan

Because many of you have asked for it, we have just rolled-out a beta of our private saving feature. To try it out, go to “settings” and click on “private saving” to activate; you’ll then see the new option whenever you save a page.

This is a big step for del.icio.us, but one that I hope will make it more useful. Because del.icio.us is all about sharing and we don’t want to discourage that, we will be watching how this feature impacts the community and will also be experimenting a bit with the UI over the next few weeks.

So if you’re one of those antisocial types who doesn’t like to share their toys, this one’s for you. Give it a whirl and let us know what you think.

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a few things and an outage

We've just released a few small features -- inline editing, so you can edit and arrange your bookmarks much more quickly, and we've prettied up the URL info page so it is easier to get at the conversation around the links.

Just after midnight on Thursday, we'll be bringing down the site to roll out some database changes, which will allow us to release private saving and a few related features in the following week. The site will be down for about four hours; announcements will be made here as we go.

Update 12:13am Pacific: Just started the first change. I expect this part to take one hour.

Update 1:45am Pacific: Still running the first part. Just one part to go after this (will take about the same amount of time as it is just the first change propagating across the databases.)

Update 3:19am Pacific: First part just finished. Changes are replicating to the other servers. This should go more quickly.

Update 4:07am Pacific: Second part is completed. I am testing servers and preparing to bring the site back online.

Update 4:30am Pacific: The site is coming back up now. The popular and intersection servers are a bit behind and will come up shortly.

Update 4:47am Pacific: Intersection and popular are back up. There's a few bad cached items in popular; I will let them flush themselves out over time.

Everything should be working at this point. The next round of upgrades to the site to roll out our next batch of features should not involve taking the site down.

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let me buy you a beer at sxsw

Please join Flickr, Upcoming.org, Del.icio.us, and Yahoo!, for Happy Hour on Sunday March 12 at Iron Cactus on the corner of Trinity and 6th from 5 to 7-ish. It'll be fun!

Terms of Service:

• Free drinks
• Free food
• Kickass band: I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness
• Iron Cactus
  606 Trinity St (Yahoo! Maps)
  Austin, Texas 73301
  

User Generated Content:

• Self, in attendance
• SXSWi badge
• RSVP via Upcoming

Note: Space is limited, so please mark that you're attending this event to get on the guest list. Yup, this means you need to have an Upcoming.org account to RSVP (cads!), but I'm sure you already have one!

Update: If you are a Flickr, del.icio.us or Upcoming.org user but don't have a SXSW badge, please RSVP here and we'll get you in!

finally

After a whole lot of work, we're finally ready to migrate the main website to a new facility on Saturday, January 21st at 12 midnight EST. The site should dissapear only briefly as we switch. Some features, such as tag pages and feeds have already been running on the new hardware for a few days.

We're moving to more and bigger hardware (we lost a number of machines in our previous power outages.) I'm looking forward to moving out of damage-control mode and continuing to roll out new features and functionality.

Update: We've done the migration. We're working on a few minor issues but most stuff works.

Update: Tagrolls are fixed. Still working on the intersection issues.

yet another power outage

Our colocation facility bounced the power again (apparently in order to deal with the failed UPS that caused our previous incident.) We are on route to the facility to bring servers back online now and that should be done shortly. We have been and will continue to work with Yahoo! to migrate to better facilities as fast as humanly possible.

(chronology moved inside the post)

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continued hiccups

Due to the power outage earlier in the week, we are dealing with a number of continued hiccups. We've taken everything offline to properly rebuild and restore everything. I apologize and hope to have this resolved as soon as possible. Thank you for your continued patience.

(Chronology moved inside the post)

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power failure

Our datacenter has had full power outage, and we are now recovering from the aftermath. About half of the machines are still down and we are working on bringing them back as soon as possible. To keep things moving, I've turned off RSS and some other features so that posting will still work and so that you will still have access to your bookmarks.

5pm EST Update: Everything is back up. We apologize for the inconvenience. It looks like a number of slave servers are corrupted. We're rebuilding them now and taken the site down so this goes as quickly as possible.

Update: Some servers are coming up. Should be going much faster from here on in.

PS --  we are obviously not yet on the Yahoo! infrastructure, and this is exactly the kind of stuff they can do a lot better for us (and you.)

Update: Most stuff is up, finally. Tag intersections are currently not working, and search is not updating -- a few servers would not come up. We'll bring them up tomorrow when we return to the east coast.

y.ah.oo!

We're proud to announce that del.icio.us has joined the Yahoo! family.  Together we'll continue to improve how people discover, remember and share on the Internet, with a big emphasis on the power of community.  We're excited to be working with the Yahoo! Search team - they definitely get social systems and their potential to change the web. (We're also excited to be joining our fraternal twin Flickr!)

We want to thank everyone who has helped us along the way - our employees, our great investors and advisors, and especially our users.  We still want to get your feedback, and we look forward to bringing you new features and more servers in the future.

I look forward to continuing my vision of social and community memory, and taking it to the next level with the del.icio.us community and Yahoo!

extend your firefox 581%

After much effort, we've finally released our official Firefox extension which supports Firefox 1.0.7+ and up.

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