I am not quite a self-contained as D’arcy and probably won’t be. He dumped Flickr and I don’t see myself doing that anytime soon as I really like Flickr and the service it provides. I see it more as a backup for my photos than the main storage so it is not my end-all, be-all  for image files. I have tried Coppermine and, to be honest, really didn’t like it at all.

But, I have all this “power” with my Bluehost account over installing MySQL databases, adding users and so forth. I wanted to wield that power!!

The Hippie Hosting co-op is intriguing but I have invested way in advance wlth Bluehost and have no complaints so I am going to stick with them for a while.

Thus far, I have installed Lessn for a way to shorten URLs ala Bit.ly and tinyurl to keep them local rather than relying on a third party service. Seems to work fine but my main concern is that the domain I am using (audreyjwilliams.info) is so darn long it might not be as helpful for URL shortening as I would have hoped. I guess my decision is if something t-f.net is available and worth the $20/year for another domain.

I also have installed Scuttle for bookmarking. After Delicious was purchased by Yahoo and then leaked that it might be “sunsetted”, I really was concerned about my bookmarks as I had LOTS of them (I have been using it since 2005). I jumped to Pinboard and that has worked but I also liked the idea of having a local version of these bookmarks, just in case. I do like how Pinboard gathers my URLs from Delicious as well as from Twitter so it really is an aggregation of all the places where I save URLs.

Also, installing Scuttle allowed me to become a bit more of a MySQL admin as I had to create a new database, new DB user and then run SQL scripts to create the tables, etc. I have always used something like Fantastico and SimpleScripts to do this in the past, so I was happy that my efforts went off with no problems.

But, wait, it can’t be all smooth sailing

Image: 'The droids we're googling for' http://www.flickr.com/photos/49462908@N00/3951143570

However, when it came time to import my Delicious bookmarks into Scuttle, I did hit a roadblock. Scuttle only will import XML files from Delicious. Delicious used to be able to do that so I was off to my best friend, Google, for some suggestions.

I found a Python script on GitHub that sounded good and learned that I can run Python from TextWrangler (awesome!!) However, that had some kind of error in it so I could not get the XML file generate.

I found deliciousxml.com was another often mentioned alternative that no longer answers as a webpage (Doh!). However, I did find on Tech Cocktail that you can use this URL:

Use command line prompts to export your bookmarks. Visit the following URL:  https://{your username}:{your password}@api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all > bookmarks.xml to get the bookmarks as bookmarks.xml

That worked great and I know have my bookmarks in Scuttle from Delicious. Now, if I can figure out to get all of my bookmarks from Pinboard into Scuttle – I would really have the funnel in place and a nice redundancy for this collection.

Back to my good friend, Google!

That struck me as blog-lazy. So, I deleted that. My plan was to use that feed as a way to make a very easy backup of the sites that I link in del.icio.us. And, it is that. But, it also seems to be the only fresh content and I don’t really like that so much.

So, off to find something else for capturing the deliciousness of social bookmarking but without acting like it is the main author of the blog.

Image: ‘I suppose I’d better start then!‘
www.flickr.com/photos/77671572@N00/188648433

Done!

Upgrading WordPress « WordPress Codex

Step 3: Do something nice for yourself [...]

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