I have been experiencing an ongoing issue with the Delicious Firefox add-in where the list of local bookmarks didn’t jive with the list on the Delicious website – I had more locally than on the Delicious website. After an unfruitful exchange with Delicious support (does anyone ever really get any help with first level support? No offense intended, people), I set out to figure out what was going on myself.
Turns out that another Firefox add-in called RefControl caused the post to the Delicious website to fail when adding new bookmarks. The add-in uses a local SqlLite instance to cache your bookmarks offline so as to improve performance, so what was happening was that the add-in added the bookmark locally, but the post to the website failed, and so the bookmark never was really ‘saved’. What’s the rub? The add-in received an ‘authentication failed’ response from the Delicious services, but didn’t notify the user that an error occurred. Happily, I kept on, thinking my bookmarks were safe and ubiquitously stored on Delicious’ servers. Bad, bad design, that decision not to capture an exception and notify the user.
It wasn’t until I noticed the discrepancy between the add-in and the web that I ever realized there was a problem. To make matters worse, there’s no way to sync between your local cache and the web, only a one-way from the web to your local cache. So I had to hack up the SqlLite database of bookmarks, cull the ones that were missing from the web, and re-add them one by one. Not a fun thing to make your users do. Again, shame on you, Delicious.
Incidentally, the fix for using RefControl and Delicious together in Firefox is to add an exception to RefControl: Allow del.icio.us as Normal.