del-icio-us

How one Tweet saved 12 years of my work

I keep a copy of every bookmark on a site called del.icio.us. I also shared all of my educational links with a network of people. Many people have thanked me for those links over the years. However, in the last year, after being passed around to buyers a few times, del.icio.us seems to be falling apart. They no longer provide a way to export your links, and I did not have a recent backup (my poor planning). I had 3736 bookmarks in jeopardy and no way to get them out.

I searched the web and found nothing. I then searched Twitter and stumbled onto this post by D.A. Gutierrez:

I reached out to him via Twitter and he offered two options: 1. he would move everything for me. or 2. he'd give me a link to some code (written by Krzysztof Szafranek) and detailed instructions on how to run it myself.

I took option 2 and his instructions were spot on and worked perfectly. I even ran it for a friend and sent him all of his 17,000+ bookmarks for safe keeping.

D.A. also provided me with a half-dozen choices for new bookmarking software. I went for Pinboard. You can follow my educational links here:
https://pinboard.in/u:arvind/t:21apples/ (there is an RSS feed available, too). I paid $11 a year for the privilege, and will now back up my links 1x/month. They make many export options available.

These bookmarks (most public, some private) are a way for me to organize my resources and access them from any computer. Were it not for D.A., my work since 2005 would have been lost into the Internet ether.

I'm grateful today. Thank you, D.A.

note: I came out of blog hiding to write this in case it helped a single other del.icio.us user.

NEIT2009 Begins Wednesday!

I am so excited to be headed to the 2009 NYSAIS Education and Information Technology Conference (#NEIT2009) tomorrow at the Mohonk Mountain House in upstate New York.

You can follow us mainly via the NEIT wiki but also via the many social media tools we are using like:

We hope to have a lot of remote participation, so please join us if you can. We resume our practice of using open space technology for the entire conference. There are no pre-planned sessions, and the entire agenda will be set over the course of the conference. The two exceptions are our keynotes, Michael Wesch and Siva Vaidhyanathan. They’re both superstar speakers, so don’t miss the live or via the UStream – Vaidhyanathan will speak on 11/11/2009 from 2:15-3:30 EST and Wesch will speak on 11/13/2009 from 9-10:30am and 10:45-11:45am EST. If you can’t make it live, the video podcasts will be available.

That’s all for now, watch out for tweets, pictures and more the rest of this week!