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Show HN: I wrote my own Delicious clone
- cheald 16y agoAfter 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. :)
- endtime 16y agoFunny, 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.
- AndrewDucker 16y agoAre you planning on doing RSS feeds for each page? They're pretty vital for reposting to other sites.
- cheald 16y agoYeah, RSS and JSON views are on the shortlist.
- philfreo 16y agogot an error upon sign up
- cheald 16y agoFixing it! Edit: Fixed!
- philfreo 16y agoand 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 16y agoI 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)
- Vekz 16y agoCan I import my Delicious data to this?
- cheald 16y agoYup. Once you log in there's an import tool that'll import any standard Netscape bookmarks file, which is what Delicious exports as.
- joshuarr 16y agoI'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).
- pyre 16y agoLooks 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 16y agoYeah, 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.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- ryanf 16y agoThe 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.
- wyclif 16y agoOn 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.
- joshu 16y agoReplace the logo with text. It renders strangely on my mac.
- cheald 16y ago...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. :)
- taylorbuley 16y agoYou could nitpick the old delicious too. This is great. Good work. What's next?
- cheald 16y agoYou tell me. What would you like to see in it?
- Skywing 16y agoLooks 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. :)
- jtg 16y agoFor 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.
- icco 16y agoLooks cool. Two things: I would love if you open sourced it, and dear god that domain sucks, but whatever it was free right? :p
- steve19 16y agoAny plans to open source it so we can run it on our own Heroku instance?
- AdamGibbins 16y agoI'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.
- Infomus 16y agoThis is really great. But - http://blog.delicious.com/ http://blog.delicious.com/ Delicious is not shutting down.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- cheald 16y agoWell, 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
- andycds 16y agoCongratulations! Great job! You could change the link of an user. Instead http://1r7.net/people/4d0c18ee1e62882c6d00058b http://1r7.net/people/4d0c18ee1e62882c6d00058b think http://1r7.net/people/andycds http://1r7.net/people/andycds.
- Skywing 16y agoYou can - in settings.
- dekz 16y agoPassword is too long (maximum is 20 characters) :( Looks good otherwise, especially for a overnight hack.
- cheald 16y agoI'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
- shazow 16y agoFantastic. 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 16y agoAPI 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.
- Pfiffer 16y agoIs 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 16y agoIt'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.
- Skywing 16y agoCSS annoyance: The import bookmarks, and bookmarklet links had a:hover text-dec underline, which creates an out of place underline on Chrome.
- Skywing 16y agoI see you fixed this. :)
- foomarks 16y agoI'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.
- ghshephard 16y agoNice, 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 16y agoCan 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. :)
- sullof 16y agoGreat work!
- davidcollantes 16y agoWhere can we go to get the code now?
- shallowwater 16y agothis 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 16y agoSomeone 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.
- bradmccarty 16y agoOops? :)
- cheald 16y agoBetter a hobby project than a startup I'm betting the farm on, eh? :)
- bradmccarty 16y agoAbsolutely. I mean, I get a certain, sick satisfaction from melting servers, no matter the size.
- ericflo 16y agoKinda curious how you thought this was going to go down :)
- cheald 16y agoHonestly? 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
- jorgem 16y agoWhy not go all the way? The domain DeliciousClone.com is available.
- crocowhile 16y agoDefinition: 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
- AdamGibbins 16y agoCan you allow me to pay to get rid of the ads please? :-)
- cheald 16y agoIf 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 16y agoAdvertising 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 16y agoYeah. I realized that about an hour in, and turned them off for the time being.
- pshirishreddy 16y agoHey!!! Favicon ??
- code_duck 16y agoThat's definitely the can-do, spontaneous hacker spirit! But aren't there already like 90 delicious clones out there?
- cheald 16y agoProbably. 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. :)
- softbuilder 16y agoA friend recently launched http://mybucket.co/ http://mybucket.co/ It could use some L&F finesse but it's a pretty nice system. And it'll import from delicious.
- ihunte 16y agoDude, 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.