Simon Willison's Weblog: delicious

Page Inlink Analyzer

2008-10-15T17:23:38+00:00

Here’s why I’m so keen on JSONP APIs—Eric Miraglia’s tool fires off dozens of cross-domain JSON requests to pull together information about inbound links to your site from Yahoo! Site Explorer and del.icio.us. I imagine it would have been uneconomic for him to provide the tool if it had to proxy every request through his own server.

Via Ed Eliot

Tags: apis, delicious, eric-miraglia, javascript, json, jsonp

"Simon Willison's Weblog" on the redesigned Delicious

2008-07-31T20:34:47+00:00

"Simon Willison's Weblog" on the redesigned Delicious

The new search feature is extremely impressive; I can see myself coming here before hitting Google for some things. I’m not too keen on the way they’re adding ’www’ to the beginning of my URL when they display it though.

Tags: delicious, social-bookmarks, urls

Hacking del.icio.us with Python

2007-03-06T23:11:21+00:00

Hacking del.icio.us with Python

Nat introduces snaflr, a Python script for republishing selected links from a number of del.icio.us users to one communal account.

Tags: delicious, natalie-downe, python

Why you should be using disambiguated URLs

2007-02-04T13:57:24+00:00

Good URLs are important. The best URLs are readable, reliable and hackable.

One of the nice things about Rails, Django and other modern Web frameworks is that most of them encourage smart URL design. Rails has relatively smart defaults and a powerful routing system for custom URLs; Django forces you to think about URL design up front by defining them as regular expressions. Many of the definitive "Web 2.0" sites such as Flickr and del.icio.us also use well designed URLs. This is a positive trend, and long may it continue.

There's one aspect of URL design that is often ignored. Good URLs should be unambiguous. By that, I mean that any logical piece of content should have one and only one definitive URL, with any alternatives acting as a permanent redirect.

This rule is frequently broken. Here are some examples:

My Flickr photo stream lives at www.flickr.com/photos/simon/ and flickr.com/photos/simon/
My del.icio.us account is at del.icio.us/simonw and del.icio.us/simonw/
The YDN Python Developer center lives at both http://developer.yahoo.com/python/ and http://developer.yahoo.com/python/index.html
The Google AdSense sign-in page is at https://www.google.com/adsense/ and https://google.com/adsense/. If you visit the latter you get a scary certificate warning (they really need to fix that).

In each of the above cases, it's obvious to regular people that the URLs are the same. Unfortunately, from a technical point of view they are different and could quite feasibly serve up different content. This causes all kinds of problems:

Caches (both browser and intermediate proxies) can't improve performance if you request the same content from a different URL.
Browser can't show users their visited links.
Social link sharing sites such as del.icio.us can't accurately aggregate links to the same resource.

That last one in particular should catch your attention if you care about effectively promoting your site. Here's a random example, plucked from today's del.icio.us popular. convinceme.net is a new online debating site (tag clouds, gradient fills, rounded corners). It's listed in del.icio.us a total of four times!

http://www.convinceme.net/ has 36 saves
http://www.convinceme.net/index.php has 148 saves
http://convinceme.net/ has 211 saves
http://convinceme.net/index.php has 38 saves

Combined that's 433 saves; much more impressive, and more likely to end up at the top of a social sharing sites.

Here's a useful rule of thumb:

Links to (and within) your site should never, ever end with index.php / index.html / default.aspx / any default directory index filename.

The whole point those defaults is that you can link to the containing directory to see their content, resulting in a shorter and prettier URL. If you're linking to them directly you're missing out on a golden opportunity to disambiguate your URLs.

Disambiguating your URLs isn't particularly difficult. The no-www site offers tips on having one domain name redirect to the other, and there are various mod_rewrite techniques for achieving the desired effect as well. If mod_rewrite makes your hair stand on end, remember that if you are using a server-side scripting language such as PHP you can implement rewriting logic in your application code by examining the $_ENV['PATH_INFO'] variable or your platform's equivalent.

Django sites get this behaviour for free, thanks to some default settings and Django's CommonMiddleware. You can that in action on this weblog: try here, here and here.

Tags: delicious, django, flickr, rants, urls

Del.icio.us fun with automated links

2006-12-25T00:26:55+00:00

Del.icio.us fun with automated links

Nat’s documented one of del.icio.us’ least promoted features—the ability to auto-post your links to your weblog once a day.

Tags: delicious, natalie-downe

Quoting Dave Winer

2006-12-20T19:21:48+00:00

I read on Niall Kennedy that del.icio.us has come up with an API that returns a JSON structure, and I figured, sheez it can't be that hard to parse, so let's see what it looks like, and damn, IT'S NOT EVEN XML! [...] Who did this travesty? Let's find a tree and string them up. Now.

— Dave Winer

Tags: dave-winer, delicious, douglas-crockford, json, niall-kennedy, xml

del.icio.us/tag/openidconsumer

2006-08-20T03:14:43+00:00

del.icio.us/tag/openidconsumer

Help me build a list of sites that let you log in with OpenID.

Tags: delicious, openid

restobook

2006-07-27T22:59:30+00:00

restobook

Python Series 60 + del.icio.us + phone address book = restaurant fun.

Tags: delicious

del.icio.us/tag/flickr

2006-04-28T11:00:44+00:00

del.icio.us/tag/flickr

del.icio.us shows Flickr thumbnails—not sure when that was added.

Tags: delicious, flickr

del.icio.us/help/navigation

2005-11-22T20:04:07+00:00

del.icio.us/help/navigation

So that’s what the input boxes in the nav are for.

Tags: delicious

[Greasemonkey] Monkey Do

2005-08-18T17:39:09+00:00

[Greasemonkey] Monkey Do

User script that automatically posts interesting things to del.icio.us.

Tags: delicious, greasemonkey

del.icio.us: casting the net wider

2005-06-14T09:01:07+00:00

del.icio.us: casting the net wider

system: tags are a really neat way of adding specialised tag features.

Tags: delicious, tagging

del.icio.us/tag/aprilfools

2005-04-01T18:53:18+00:00

del.icio.us/tag/aprilfools

No need for me to keep linking to them now.

Tags: delicious

[delicious-discuss] big news

2005-03-30T08:55:42+00:00

[delicious-discuss] big news

Joshua has funding, and is now working on del.icio.us full time.

Tags: delicious

del.icio.us/popular with sparklines

2005-02-14T03:30:40+00:00

del.icio.us/popular with sparklines

Clever use of sparklines to show popularity over time.

Via Waxy

Tags: delicious

Blogmarks on del.icio.us

2004-12-02T00:13:22+00:00

I'm horribly ill again: having defeated the mumps I now seem to have come down with some kind of 'flu thing. Lovely. In between whinging about my state of health and watching episodes of Frasier I've been playing with del.icio.us as part of my research in to web annotation. The connection between the two isn't particularly strong but it's clear that something very exciting is happening over there.

This evening I wrote a script to import my blogmarks in to del.icio.us. I don't plan to replace them with a feed from the site for a couple of reasons: firstly, I like to keep my data somewhere I control and secondly, del.icio.us doesn't support my "via" fields. I will however be adding tag support to my blogmarks and some kind of functionality to ensure that anything I post to them is added to del.icio.us as well.

The problem I have now is that I've added nearly 1200 untagged links to del.icio.us, and anyone who has played with the service for more than a few minutes knows that it's the tags that make it so much fun. Does anyone know of a good tool for bulk-tagging of items in del.icio.us? I've tried Cocoal.icio.us but unfortunately it only lets you assign tags to items one at a time; what I really want to do is run full text searches against my del.icio.us links and mass-apply tags to dozens of items at a time. If one doesn't exist I can always knock up a custom tool with the lovely API but I'd rather not duplicate the effort if I don't have to.

Tags: delicious, tagging