Scuttle: A del.icio.us clone

Just saw this today and thought I would share. It’s called Scuttle (www.scuttle.org) and it’s a PHP-based del.icio.us clone. The source code is available on their SourceForge site (http://sourceforge.net/projects/scuttle/).

For those who don’t know about del.icio.us, it’s a site that allows you to share your bookmarks with others through a tagged-based method. The idea is that you "tag" bookmarks with single words or short phrases. In principle, this allows a single site to be categorized into different "tags" thus making it easier to find what you or others are looking for. Quite an interesting concept.

Anyways...I’ve been playing with del.icio.us and quite like it. Problem is that the whole thing is quite buggy and a little slow. Plus, I’m concerned about backups and the likelyhood that the del.icio.us servers go down. So, I thought about the idea of finding something similar to del.icio.us that I could host myself and integrate into Firefox. One such application is SiteBar (www.sitebar.org). It integrates well with just about any major browser and runs as a PHP app on your own server. Only problem about it is that it’s folder-based so you really don’t gain much other than the ability to store your bookmarks on a single server.

So I found Scuttle and started playing with it a bit. It’s quite nice and I can see alot of possibilities where it could greatly be improved. Not to mention that something like this could easily be integrated as a module in MODx. One of the only major problems I see with it is the lack of integration with current browsers. There’s quite a few decent del.icio.us extensions for Firefox out there...but it would be nice to have some for something like Scuttle. There’s a few other quirks with Scuttle, nothing that couldn’t be fixed easily. Plus, there is some functionality missing from it that exists in del.icio.us...like bundles and cloud view. But the fact that it’s open-source and PHP-based means that quirks like these could easily be dealt with and I’m sure over time it’ll improve greately (especially considering that it’s only at a 0.5.1 version number!).

What I’m wonder is if there are similar apps that exist. I know there’s another one called de.lirio.us but it’s Perl-based and I’ve heard it’s a pain in the ass to deal with. Is there any other apps out there that integrate well into Firefox and other browsers that are similar to Scuttle and del.icio.us? Would be good to know!

Thanks a lot Jeff for sharing !

I didn’t know about Scuttle, it would indeed be nice to have it integrated into MODx for community/social networking websites...

I’ll check this one out, test it a little and report here

I’ve been playing with Scuttle some more and one of the things that I think is nice is that it integrates much of the same API as del.icio.us. However, there are quite a few bugs and tweaks left to be made with it. A few of the things I had to fix was a bug with the "Post to Scuttle" pop-up link. Seemed that it always popped behind the current window instead of the front. Somewhat easy fix. Another bug had to do with nothing showing up on the main "Recent Bookmarks" page. I had to play with the date variables for the start and end date to get it to work right. The last bug I had to fix was with the "Add a Bookmark" part. Whenever you attempted to add a bookmark that already existed you would get an error for a couple of functions. Turned out to be a problem with the posted tags not being parsed into an array but rather the other way around (they were using a JOIN command instead of a SPLIT command for the posted string).

Still quite a bit of work to do in it...but I think they’re on the right path more or less. I’ll be posting some of the bug fixes in the SourceForge forums for Scuttle. Hopefully they’ll get em in there soon.