1997: Blogging? Writing is best left to journalists, You need professional writing skills, the average joe can’t write…
2004: Podcasting? You need a radio voice and broadcasting experience, the average joe can’t talk the talk…
2005: Videoblogging? TV studios and Hollywood do video, the average joe doesn’t have what it takes…
Newflash: The average joes can sometimes kick the the big boys to the curb…
Remember del.icio.us? Of course you do! You probably use it daily… Don’t we all?
Heck, long ago I even proclaimed that del.icio.us is neat. gosh, I even wrote some nasty code named dir.licio.us, and some people even used it. dir.licio.us was a hack, and it’s got some problems, but with many things, it’s just a proof of concept to me. (Note: It’s a massive memory hog since it builds a lot of large hashes in memory while running.)
So what does this all have to do with Scuttle? See, Scuttle is neat. It’s bascially a GPL‘d del.icio.us clone written in PHP using MySQL. There is also de.lirio.us, which uses Rubric, which is written in Perl. Now, I’m a perl guy and installing Rubric was a royal PITA for me, so I gave up on it quickly. Scuttle on the other hand, was dead simple. (Grab the 0.5.0 version from cvs though.)
You could use either the del.icio.us or Scuttle web sites, where you get to leverage the social aspect of these apps, but are at the mercy of things you don’t control, or you could install Scuttle on your own server and control it, but lose the social aspect… What do to? Behold! Scuttle supports the del.icio.us API! This opens up a world of possibilities…
Ok, that last one is (sort of ) a joke, but the point is, for most of the complaints I’ve heard about del.icio.us, you can probably solve them with some combination of all of these things. del.icio.us servers down, or too slow, or doesn’t support private bookmarks? Scuttle not social enough, not enough users, lacking features? Fix, fix, fix…. (Need more ideas? See How to Make Delicious Not Suck.)
Code? Yes, I have some code… Right now my code pulls the entries from my del.icio.us account and syncs them to my Scuttle account, as well as a local install of Scuttle. I should get around to cleaning it up and releasing it, I just want to run it for a bit first to see if it behaves well…
Open-source, and just as important, open API’s make it all possible. It’s exciting stuff!
Long ago I started using Feed on Feeds, and I hacked the heck out of it do make it do just what I wanted, but of course as new versions of FoF came out, I never quite managed to upgrade an re-apply my hacks.
There’s been much talk lately about forking FoF, since Steve (the original developer) isn’t quite keeping pace with user’s requests, and people are wanting to see their changes fed back into the codebase. I can’t wait to see what happens with this, since it’s a piece of software I use on a daily basis. I just hope it all turns out good. I really should get the most recent FoF running and see how much I need to hack at it to get my hacks applied, and heck, maybe even make real patches…
I’m also considering moving it from my server out on the web to my server at home, since one is often overwhelmed while the other sits underutilized much of the time… red is due for an overhaul and install of all the latest and greatest from the LAMP world anyway…
