Fun with links
There seems to be a rash of social bookmark/link aggregator services being developed lately. I use del.icio.us, as you can see in the Quick links section on the right, but I also recently discovered Spurl.net. Then thereâs Furl.net.
All offer slightly different features, differing interfaces and philosophies. Spurlâs philosophy is outlined here, for example.
Furl seems to be slanted toward people storing bookmarks for their own purposes (this is the emphasis in the documentation at any rate), though they also provide an RSS feed to share your bookmarks, as well as a bit of JavaScript to display your latest bookmarks on your site. However, this returns a table, rather than the more semantically-correct unordered list or even div.
Spurl offers very nice integration with del.icio.us. Once you have logged in, you can enter your del.icio.us details in the page for your profile, and then anything you âspurlâ will also be âdel.icio.us-edâ (I really need some new verbs here). You can also import your existing del.icio.us items if you want. It has a nice interface, and if you use IE, Opera or one of the Mozilla family of browsers, you can use a neat sidebar to browse your links and add new ones. If you select any of your own links, you can see a list of links in the collections of people who have also linked to the site youâve chosenâa sort of âif you liked that, youâll probably like theseâ feature. del.icio.us has something similar but less obvious. The developer of Spurl, Hjalli seems to be keeping up a frantic pace of development, with a lot of recent improvements to functionality and features.
So, my entirely subjective impression is that del.ici.ious is the lean, mean geek machine (a huge base of users, some great links and a stripped-down interface), Furl is for your average Windows user, or people who are looking to store bookmarks for their own purposes, rather than for sharing necessarily (great searching abilities, caching of pages and so forth), and Spurl is somewhere in between (a rapidly-evolving feature set and a prettier face, but fewer users at present).
At the moment Iâm sticking with the feed from del.icio.us, but will be adding links via Spurl as well. The JavaScript method of including your links provided by Spurl is neat, and has the merits of updating instantly. When I first installed MagpieRSS, I assumed that caching was turned on by default, without really checking it out (bad! bsag, bad!). As a result, I was hitting the del.icio.us server really hard, and got quite rightly told off by the administrators. I felt so guilty about it, that Iâm caching the feed for 6 hours now, so thereâs sometimes quite a delay between me adding something to del.icio.us and it turning up here.
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Well caching is turned on by default, but often the cache directory will fail to be created effectively negating the cache. The software throughs a warning at that point, but for the most part no one sees that. I wonder if Magpie should be more aggressive? Maybe if you have caching turned on, and it canât create the cache directory it should die?
Also a 6 hour cache sounds very generous. Magpie supports both conditional get, and gzip encoduing, so I canât see Joshusa complaining about once an hour or so.-----
Kellan: Yes, I should have been clearerâthat was exactly what happened. It couldnât make the cache directory, but I didnât see the error. But I could have checked that the cache directory had been created and written to and didnât. So the 6 hour thing is my penance for not being a thorough geek
. Seriously though, I imagine it must be reasonably common for writing the cache directory to fail, and equally common for numbskulls like me not to notice, so dying at that point might be the safe thing to do. Very cool piece of software, by the way! Iâm probably going to use it to suck the last 5 thumbnails off my photoblog to display in the header here once Iâve got my RSS feed sorted out.
by bsag @ 28/04/2004 9:05 pm • Permalink •
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