What began as mild irritation last night has grown into serious ire. The del.icio.us social bookmarking site has been down for almost 15 hours now. I rely heavily on it for managing my bookmarks. The "latest links" section on the sidebar of my blog is tied to it; but the loss of that is a minor annoyance. The major annoyance is having to search Google for sites related to research and coding that I'd bookmarked online, thinking that saving them online was the safest option.
I'm thinking of moving onto other similar services (notably Simpy), but now that this has happened, I'll have to figure out a way to keep synchronizing with a given online service regularly to keep a backup of my latest bookmarks.
On a side note, the guys at delicious claim that a "power outage" caused various problems with their service, including corruption and crashing of slave/redundant servers, and last night they decided to put everything offline to rebuild their indexes. I'm not sure if this is a process that should take as long as 15 hours, if you'd set up things correctly in the first place.
Whats more interesting is that this happened right after Yahoo! acquired del.icio.us, and I wonder if the increased load from the announcement and interest led to the current problems as opposed to pure power outages.
In any case, a lesson learned, the hard way.
[Update] Del.icio.us is back on line. For those like me who didn't bother to create a backup, Foxylicious is a Firefox extension that creates a local backup of delicious bookmarks.
