FoxBoom!

Last year, I ditched del.icio.us because I had to switch back to Safari from Firefox to synchronise my bookmarks with my iPhone.

However, since the 1.1.3 firmware update lets me put links right onto the home screen… it turns out I only use a handful of websites on the iPhone, so I’ve put them all on there and I haven’t touched my bookmarks since.

Which means I’m back in Firefox, and back on del.icio.us. Good stuff!

The worst thing about ditching del.icio.us is losing my online collection of favourite xkcd comics.

Posting them here for posterity without explanation seems a little cheap… but heck, I’m a sucker for geek romance.

Couple.

Oh man! My bookmarking system is all wrong!

Okay, so, until a couple of nights ago, I was using Firefox and keeping all my bookmarks online with the del.icio.us plugin. But now I have iPhone, and iPhone synchronises its bookmarks with Safari. Not with del.icio.us.

I tried, but it didn’t work out. For an easy life, I’m going to shift all the bookmarks I really need out of del.icio.us and stick them in Safari, and any bookmarks I kept just to share will end up being blogged here.

As the obnoxious bag it came in tells me, I’ve “got it”. But rather than “it” being something as pedestrian as, say, syphilis or a Segway, it’s an iPhone.

A quick note for O2 staff: it’s a little worrying when you respond to “I’d like to buy an iPhone please” with “A what?”. And whilst I appreciate you taking the time to share your sales script with me, I’m afraid there really isn’t a polite way of saying “dude, I’ve been obsessing over this thing on the Internet for months — just take my fucking card and let me pay”, so I apologise if I came off a little short.

But now I have it! And so far, I think one of the smallest design considerations has impressed me the most; when I got home, I had a moment of dread when I realised the activation process would probably need to know my O2 account details (at least an account reference or something) to transfer my existing number, and I had no idea where all that paperwork was. I figured I’d go through the process up until that point, then try to find what I needed. But — joy to Apple’s work-out-of-the-box mentality! — when I chose to move my existing number to the iPhone, it asked for that number, then SMSed a PIN to it to prove I own it. When I entered that same PIN back in, that was proof enough and the iPhone was activated.

Whew!

In a nutshell, it’s awesome. I still need to figure out a cool way of using my del.icio.us bookmarks on it, since I don’t use Safari and thus syncing with its bookmarks is not useful. Gmail works beautifully without any fucking around, and the built-in calendar is kinda redundant when Google Calendar works so well and puts my events on the web too. Google Reader formats itself well for the iPhone, but it’s a tad confusing.

Everything else works as well as everyone else has already said. I get on very well with the keyboard and the camera is great as a portable (but then, I have a Canon 20D in tow for anything that matters). And with mad props to the BBC News team, my first SMS message was “my shoe is beef”.

Dudes, .Mac has eaten my address book and calendars, and is currently chomping through my incoming e-mail.

My new e-mail address is jon@foxboom.com, which points at GMail. I’ve shifted my appointments and reminders to Google Calendar, and I already keep my bookmarks on del.icio.us.

I’m pretty pissed at spending £69/$140 a year to backup my Really Important Stuff, to then have it totally fail. I’m even MORE pissed that my support tickets have been totally ignored.

The main point of all this is that my e-mail address has changed to jon@foxboom.com. Rar.

Since I’m not getting my new TV today, I decided to have the next-best amount of fun. Javascript!

I just discovered that del.icio.us provides JSON feeds, so I modified their “latest posts” example and stuck it in the sidebar.

<div id="recent-delicious-bookmarks" />
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://del.icio.us/feeds/json/foxboom?count=10"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
  var ul = document.createElement('ul');
  for (var i=0, post; post = Delicious.posts[i]; i++)
  {
    var li = document.createElement(’li’);
    var a = document.createElement(’a');
    a.setAttribute(’href’, post.u);
    a.appendChild(document.createTextNode(post.d));
    li.appendChild(a);
    ul.appendChild(li);
  }
  document.getElementById(’recent-delicious-bookmarks’).appendChild(ul);
</script>