Show HN: I wrote my own Delicious clone | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I wrote my own Delicious clone

1r7.net

138 pointscheald70 comments

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.

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

Yeah, RSS and JSON views are on the shortlist.

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.

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

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

Oops? :)

Better a hobby project than a startup I'm betting the farm on, eh? :)

Absolutely. I mean, I get a certain, sick satisfaction from melting servers, no matter the size.

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

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. :)

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

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.

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. :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

You can - in settings.

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

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.

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.

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. :)

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

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

Password is too long (maximum is 20 characters)

Looks good otherwise, especially for a overnight hack.

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

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

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.

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

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

...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. :)

CSS annoyance:

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

I see you fixed this. :)

Among a lot of other things, yeah. :)

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.

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

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

Can I import my Delicious data to this?

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

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).

Good point.

Nice resolution - helps a lot imo.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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. :)

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

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

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.

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. :)

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

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

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.

There is now an exporter, both in netscape bookmark format and json :)

Where can we go to get the code now?

Great work!

got an error upon sign up

Fixing it!

Edit: Fixed!

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

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)

Hey!!! Favicon ??

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