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. :)
Funny, I was thinking of doing the same with the domain I got from mslagh, but I saw that Delicious isn't dying after all before I got a chance to start.
Anyway, good on you and good on him for the domains.
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
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.
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.
On my 14" laptop display with Chrome maximised I still have a horizontal scrollbar with a bit of scrolling to see the right edge (cuts off the "New Bookmark" link). Still needs some CSS tweakage.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
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. :)