

Show HN: I wrote my own Delicious clone - cheald
http://1r7.net

======
cheald
After spending some time last night bemoaning Delicious' impending demise, I
decided to just write my own stand-in. So I put in a few extra hours last
night and banged this out.

It's running on a free Heroku instance with a $5 MongoHQ DB backing it, so I
fully expect it to explode if it gets any appreciable attention, but I'm
pretty proud of it for an evening project and wanted to share.

Thanks to HNer mslagh for the domain - I picked it up as a part of his
giveaway a few weeks back. :)

~~~
AndrewDucker
Are you planning on doing RSS feeds for each page? They're pretty vital for
reposting to other sites.

~~~
cheald
Yeah, RSS and JSON views are on the shortlist.

------
cheald
Someone wrote about it on TNW and my poor little Heroku instance exploded. I'm
gonna move import to a background worker and see if that helps matters.

~~~
ericflo
Kinda curious how you thought this was going to go down :)

~~~
cheald
Honestly? Small-scale "Oh hey, that's neat" response followed by obscurity
resulting in a tool that I have for my personal use and not much else. :P

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code_duck
That's definitely the can-do, spontaneous hacker spirit! But aren't there
already like 90 delicious clones out there?

~~~
cheald
Probably. I didn't write it with the intent to submit it to YC or anything. I
just wanted my own Delicious, and then wanted to show it off. :)

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Infomus
This is really great. But - <http://blog.delicious.com/> Delicious is not
shutting down.

~~~
cheald
Well, on one hand, yay. On the other hand, it's a shame that Yahoo won't
devote resources to it. On the third, mutant hand, they should make room in
the market for my hobby project! :D

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foomarks
I've always wished Delicious would get more social and more niche-y. One
particular idea I'm interested in is to uncover user bookmarking patterns and
not just bookmark popularity. I wonder if this this clone experiment would
play with these ideas:

\+ Finding the people who shared the same bookmarks as you, and also measure
how different they are from you: This might uncover bookmarks and areas of
interests that weren't on my radar.

\+ Look for users who have similar tagging patterns: Finding similar people
would be handy, then I could subscribe to their bookmarks. Delicious has a
feature called the user's Top 10 Tags. I wonder if there is a way to compare
how similarly you tag with other users to find similar users?

\+ When performing a search, look for the most popular bookmarks _and_ the
most unpopular to find more esoteric and possibly interesting items.

\+ An RSS feed for people who bookmarked the same thing I did: as a way to
find new people who share the same interests as you.

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shazow
Fantastic.

Signed in using Twitter OAuth, imported my Delicious backup, completely
painless.

Now if you release an API and people make awesome Chrome/Firefox extensions,
you're on your way to sell this beauty to Yahoo! :P

Edit: Looks like the Settings page is a bit broken, but I'm sure it'll be
fixed soon. Bonus points if you import my profile data from Twitter. :)

~~~
cheald
API is on the shortlist. It's a Rails 3 app, so json/XML feeds of views are
trivial.

And hey, if Yahoo wanted to buy it, I'd be more than willing to let them kill
it for the right price. At which point I could write another. :P

I do some minor profile import from Twitter right now (just your name, if
available), but the data's cached locally if I add profile fields in the
future.

The settings page is busted because of a fix I just made - Devise doesn't seem
to like delegated auth accounts without a password. I'll see what I can do to
fix it up.

------
pyre
Looks good. Some nits though:

1\. There isn't enough margin on the left side of the page. The text bumps up
_right_ against the edge of my browser. I don't know if this is just an
oversight due to me smaller screen size (1024x600) or if everyone sees it like
that.

2\. The main page has horizontal scrolling on my netbook with fullscreen
Chromium.

~~~
cheald
Yeah, I pushed it right up to the edge of the 1024x screen size (forgetting,
stupidly, about netbooks). I'll see if I can dial it down a bit.

Edit: I reduced it a bit; should fix those issues.

~~~
ryanf
The problem isn't the page width. Just add 10px of left padding to your
container div for people who don't keep their browser maximized all the time.

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andycds
Congratulations! Great job! You could change the link of an user. Instead
<http://1r7.net/people/4d0c18ee1e62882c6d00058b> think
<http://1r7.net/people/andycds>.

~~~
Skywing
You can - in settings.

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steve19
Any plans to open source it so we can run it on our own Heroku instance?

~~~
AdamGibbins
I'm not sure that would do it justice. It's a social network, without
centralisation people are going to be scattered everywhere and the social
benefits of delicious wouldn't have anywhere near the effect they do now.

Unless I guess, you could think of some smart way to have the social
networking expanding over multiple sites smoothly.

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ghshephard
Nice, Clean interface. Fast, responsive.

It's broken right now (Won't import my book marks, refers to me as
"4d0c26c34caddf4914000003!") - but I'm looking forward to trying it out.

~~~
cheald
Can you email me your bookmarks file (provided it's not too sensitive)? cheald
at gmail - I will play with it and see what's up.

You can change your displayed name in the settings. :)

~~~
Skywing
Actually you can't right now. It's broken. Says "Current password can't be
blank"

~~~
cheald
Pushing a fix for that now. Devise is one touchy bastard. >:|

------
dekz
Password is too long (maximum is 20 characters)

:(

Looks good otherwise, especially for a overnight hack.

~~~
cheald
I'll take a look - that seems wacky. I'm using devise for authentication and
it probably has that set as a default somewhere. Passwords are stored as
bcrypt hashes, so length shouldn't matter.

Edit: Max length bumped to 80. If anyone has a legit need past that, let me
know :P

------
AdamGibbins
Can you allow me to pay to get rid of the ads please? :-)

~~~
cheald
If this goes anywhere, sure. Traffic jumped a LOT faster than I'd expected, so
I'm running ads briefly to try to get a feel for what their impact will be vs.
costs. Heroku is a nice platform, but it's pricey, especially for a hobby
project with no monetization strategy.

~~~
jacquesm
Advertising figures gathered at this stage and traffic level will be
relatively meaningless compared to something larger so you will have to re-
test later if you want to get a real feel.

Likely CRTs and income (and ECPm) will drop off sharply as it gets bigger.

~~~
cheald
Yeah. I realized that about an hour in, and turned them off for the time
being.

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joshu
Replace the logo with text. It renders strangely on my mac.

~~~
cheald
...the logo does?

(But that's a fair point; that's one of 3 images I used on the site)

Edit: Logo is now text. Only the import/bookmarklet and twitter buttons are
images now. :)

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Skywing
CSS annoyance:

The import bookmarks, and bookmarklet links had a:hover text-dec underline,
which creates an out of place underline on Chrome.

~~~
Skywing
I see you fixed this. :)

~~~
cheald
Among a lot of other things, yeah. :)

~~~
wyclif
Another feature request: for people like me who imported Delicious tags and
thus have a lot of them, a tag cloud would be nice, I prefer it to a long
scrolling list of tags.

~~~
cheald
That's fair. I'll see if I can whip one up.

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icco
Looks cool. Two things: I would love if you open sourced it, and dear god that
domain sucks, but whatever it was free right? :p

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Vekz
Can I import my Delicious data to this?

~~~
cheald
Yup. Once you log in there's an import tool that'll import any standard
Netscape bookmarks file, which is what Delicious exports as.

~~~
joshuarr
I'd mention that fact on the landing page. It seems more important than the
domain name stuff (which I'd remove, personally).

It may be also a good idea to let people import their bookmarks and then make
an account.

Edit: I see now that in the But... section you mention the import thing. I'd
rewrite your main headings to be more persuasive. If one just reads the titles
and the first paragraph then one misses the important stuff (as evidenced by
my post).

~~~
cheald
Good point.

~~~
joshuarr
Nice resolution - helps a lot imo.

------
jtg
For a "few extra hours," this is excellent. And I like the route that you're
taking by trying to produce as faithful of a reproduction as you can. It's set
to basically be a drop-in replacement. Keep doing what you're doing. I love
it.

------
softbuilder
A friend recently launched <http://mybucket.co/> It could use some L&F finesse
but it's a pretty nice system. And it'll import from delicious.

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Pfiffer
Is there any way to import bookmarks from Chrome? I see it mentioned but then
it just redirects me to the delicious importer. Place-holder text?

Edit: Also it appears to be down atm.

~~~
cheald
It's Heroku's free plan, so there's only one worker. When someone's doing a
big import, everyone else gets backed up behind them. I just added another
worker, getting me out of "free" but into "functional". :)

You can do a bookmarks export from Chrome to HTML, then import that HTML file.
All the browsers use the standard Netscape bookmarks file format, AFAIK.

~~~
dekz
I think your heroku instance is dying under the traffic :P

~~~
cheald
Yup. I'm gonna crank it up for a short bit then see if I can scale it down to
not end up with a $500 bill at the end of the month. :)

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jorgem
Why not go all the way? The domain DeliciousClone.com is available.

~~~
crocowhile
Definition: delicious Synonyms: ambrosial, appetizing, choice, delectable,
delightful, divine, enticing, fit for a king, good, heavenly, juicy, luscious,
mouthwatering, nectarous, out of this world, palatable, piquant, pleasant,
rich, sapid, savory, scrumptious, spicy, succulent, super, sweet, tasteful,
tasty, tempting, toothsome

------
ihunte
Dude, you really need to setup a github repo for that! I think many ppl gonna
be pissed about the real delicious and would help you creating an awesome
clone, with more features.

------
Skywing
Looks good. I might even like the appearance of it more than delicious. Easily
my favorite part about delicious, though, is the Chrome plugin. Make one. :)

------
taylorbuley
You could nitpick the old delicious too. This is great. Good work. What's
next?

~~~
cheald
You tell me. What would you like to see in it?

------
shallowwater
this looks pretty great, but I have to be a total dick here for a minute and
ask. Is there an exporter? Given the current climate, I think it is at least a
little bit reasonable to ask.

~~~
cheald
Not yet. That's fairly straightforward, though. Long term, there will be your
standard bookmarks style exporter, as well as RSS/JSON/XML feeds for
consumption.

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davidcollantes
Where can we go to get the code now?

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sullof
Great work!

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philfreo
got an error upon sign up

~~~
cheald
Fixing it!

Edit: Fixed!

~~~
philfreo
and now i get an error when i try to change my username from the default
random hash you gave me.

no offense, but don't post until you have the basic stuff together... people
don't give you that many chances to impress

~~~
cheald
I thought I'd got most of the big pieces, but I was apparently tired last
night when I did that. _grin_

Point humbly taken, though I'll try to get those fixed up ASAP.

(I used a new authentication framework on this project and haven't quite
gotten my head around the edges, it seems)

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pshirishreddy
Hey!!! Favicon ??

