diigo

As I noted earlier, some ongoing problems with the Diigo Firefox add-on and general annoyance at the graffiti public annotations feature prompted me to switch my transient bookmarking to Delicious. Some great support from the Diigo team resolved the add-on problem, at least for now, so I may be giving the service a second chance.

If you’re having the problem I was having with the Diigo add-on–a missing “Add to a List” menu option when bookmarking a page–these steps may save you some grief:

1. Right click on the firefox toolbar area
2. Click Customize…
3. Click Restore default set.
4. Sign out of Diigo and sign-in again

You may have to repeat these steps; I had to do it twice for the change to stick. But it’s a lot easier than the earlier troubleshooting steps, which involved creating a fresh Firefox profile and adding, one at a time, the dozen or so add-ins I use to see if there were conflicts with the Diigo toolbar.

Note that this does not, as I had feared it might, reset your Firefox to its default settings. But it’s not a bad idea to back up your Firefox settings, especially if you’ve made a lot of tweaks; take a look at the MozBackup tool for a nice and easy way to do this.

I’ve turned off the public annotations–from the Diigo button, choose “Show all annotations” and toggle to “Don’t show annotation”–to banish the yellow sticky notes left on Google, Wikipedia, and other sites by a handful of vandals. For the next few days I’ll be alternating between Diigo and Delicious before making a final decision on which service I’ll stick with long term.

A big thanks again to the Diigo support team; their prompt assistance certainly helps their service in my weighing of options. There’s no overestimating the value of solid technical support, whether a problem is big or small.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been using Furl as part of my Twitter “strategy.” I go through my RSS feeds a couple times a day, flagging the items that might be of interest to my Twitter followers with Furl’s easy-to-use bookmarklet and categorizing them according to the appropriate Twitter identity: Minnesota things for We Like It Here, poetry and Dickinson-related items for Daily Dickinson, and various odds and sods for my personal Twitter account. Then my good friends at twitterfeed take over, periodically sending the resulting RSS feeds to the appropriate Twitter zone.

Alas, no longer.

I went to add this lovely spring photograph to the We Like It Here feed, and the bookmarklet responded with an abrupt message about how Furl has been “absorbed” by something called Diigo. There was no warning that I saw that this was coming (the Furl blog has been silent since January 21, and the Twitter feed since January 6); it just happened. At least the notice was nice enough to include instructions on how to transfer my feed contents over to the new service, and the transfer was flawless, but it was an abrupt interruption to my workflow.

One of the things I liked about Furl was that it was bare bones and no-nonsense. If you want to have a categorized collection of bookmarks, stored on the web for easy access from any location and available as RSS feeds, with the ability to do some simple annotation, it was perfect. No voting, no “Digging,” no “friending,” just bookmarking.

Diigo seems to want to be more than that. Their front page announces that “reading is more fun with friends” (an assertion with which I beg to differ, being a proudly solitary reader), that “[y]ou are what you annotate” (actually, I’m not…), and gives me all sorts of opportunities to “meet people” and “join communities.” Honestly, I’ve met about as many people as I care to, and I don’t need another “social media” site to worry about; Flickr, Twitter and Facebook are sufficient for my curmudgeonly needs.

Still, Diigo did a good job of importing my bookmarks, and they have a nice enough Firefox plugin for doing the bookmarking, and they publish my collections as RSS. (I had to make each one public and set the sorting to be descending by date, but that was reasonable enough.) It’s an interruption, but not a catastrophe.

But there was still one more fly in the ointment: Diigo adds stuff the RSS items that I don’t especially want. I discovered that, in addition to the title and URL (which is all I really want), the feed coming over to Twitter included “Tags: no_tag Posted by: mhartford” on each item. With 140 characters allowed for each “tweet,” that’s an expensive chunk of useless information. (Incidentally: if my bookmark doesn’t contain any tags, wouldn’t it make sense that the who “Tags:” element be excluded from the RSS item? If I were writing the code, that’s what I’d do…)

Fortunately, there’s a good (and fun) solution: Yahoo! Pipes.

Pipes is an online feed manipulation tool that can consume RSS, HTML snippets, web service output, and other kinds of content, perform operations on the incoming content, and emit the output as a new RSS feed (or as JSON, e-mail messages, or a chunk of PHP code, if one is so inclined). The resulting collection of actions and its output can then be saved and published.

I looked at the XML that Diigo spat out, and discovered that it had some blocks of HTML inside the description element that I wanted to get rid of:

<description>
<p></p>
<p><strong>Tags:</strong> <a href='http://www.diigo.com/user/mhartford/no_tag' rel='tag'>no_tag</a>
</p><p><strong>Posted by:</strong> <a href='http://www.diigo.com/user/mhartford'>mhartford</a></p>
</description>


By creating a Yahoo! Pipe pointing to the Diigo RSS URL, and passing it through a regex (“regular expression”) control, I was able to remove the offending crud. The regex control simply points at the description item, and asks Yahoo! Pipes to remove anything that matches <p.*></p>. Hey presto! And it’s clean.

A useful side effect of the Yahoo! Pipes approach is that I’ve essentially created a proxy service for my RSS feeds. If I should have to migrate again, or otherwise fiddle with the output, I don’t have to point my feed readers or twitterfeed to another URL: I can continue to point to Yahoo! Pipes and make drastic changes invisible to consumers.

I’m still waiting to be impressed by Diigo; I don’t have any particular interest in the social media aspects of it, and I worry that if that component doesn’t grab traction in an increasingly over-”friended” online world, the useful aspects will be lost when Diigo goes under. I’ll continue to look for a Furl replacement.

But Yahoo! Pipes impresses me to no end. It’s easy and fun to work with (you drag controls around and string them together in a nice UI), powerful as heck but simple to use. I expect it to be a key piece of my arsenal of tools for taming the Internet’s ever-expanding river of content.