Things delicious: Recipes, bookmarks, libraries

I used to work with Joshua Schachter. Or at least we used to work at the same company. Back before blogs were much of anything Schachter created Memepool, a dense repository of links to things of no particular import. I don't check Memepool regularly as it's been replaced by actual blogs, as well as sites like Digg and Reddit–social bookmarking sites that theoretically allow all the interesting links to froth up to the top. (I don't really check Reddit or Digg very often, either. I'm pretty much using my iMac for digital photography and Warcraft.)

Schacthter is responsible for the grandaddy of social bookmarking (and tagging) sites, del.icio.us, and del.icio.us is responsible for making Schachter much richer than he would be if he remained a salaried man. I created a del.icio.us account a few years ago and never really thought much of it. Recently I came across this idea for a del.icio.us recipe book which is rather clever, so I resurrected my account and will see how it works for recipes, with the random link thrown in for good measure.

Because I just can't put enough crap in 34's sidebar, you should see a list of recent del.icio.us links over on the right, though new links take a while to show up there.

A very long time ago (almost ten years to the day!) a younger Jeff'y released URL Clerk, a very simple Mac OS application written in C that allowed you to save Internet bookmarks as files and visit sites by opening them in the Finder or the Apple Menu. It got brief mention in TidBITS and The Internet Starter Kit of the Mac, 4th ed. (which is so old I can't find a link to it), and I still have some nice emails folks sent me with feedback. The point being that after using del.icio.us a bit I see the potential for replacing the Bookmarks menu in Safari with a system-wide menu that would display a dynamically generated list of your del.icio.us bookmarks–basically taking 10 year old technology and tweaking it a bit. There appears to be a Firefox plugin that offers integration, but I'm a Safari/sometimes Camino user.

The del.icio.us APIs look straightforward and I know there are examples of creating system-wide custom menus in MacOS X, so the real effort involved would be learning Objective-C. Which, I'm not really sure I'd want to do.

Completely unrelated and dissimilarly delicious is Delicious Library. While my new iMac has a built in iSight I haven't gotten around to inventorying everything I have ever owned via barcode scanning.

Comments

  1. InfoMofoJune 02, 2006

    Delicious Library's scanning feature almost makes me wish I'd obtained my music and movies legitimately... And that I hadn't stolen my iSight from that nursing home...

    Of course, the solution is to create a filesharing system that distributes the barcodes along with the pirated material, right? Delicious-ly evil!

    ReplyDelete

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