delicious¶
974 words on Software
My main gripe with many of the second web sites is that they encourage you to enter you data and then just keep it without giving you an (easy) option to export it and take it elsewhere. This is where sites having APIs that actually give access to your data and are reasonably easy to use come handy. delicious one of them, and I started finding it much more useful once I saw that there are a number of tools which simply let you download your bookmarks.
Cocoalicious is a very powerful such tool which is cool if you want to edit your bookmarks. But usually that’s not what I want to do as my idea of delicious is more along the lines of 1) Hit the ★ link in my Safari bookmark bar to invoke the delicious bookmark script, 2) add a snide comment to the link and quite possibly 3) throw in some random tags. No editing needed there. I.e. Cocoalicious is a bit too powerful / bloated for my needs as I’d just want to mirror my delicious links locally.
To be honest, ideally I could see myself appreciating my Safari bookmarks and my delicious bookmarks being properly synchronised. But I am not even sure whether the iSync architecture and the delicious API would be up to that; or how the comments and tags would be stored in Safari bookmarks. Besides, it looks like actually writing a iSync plugin is quite strenuous (how many iSync plugins are there?).
And thus I have been a big fan of the delimport utility for a long time. It’s a background application that polls delicious every thirty minutes and stores a copy of your bookmarks locally. It also comes with a Spotlight importer which means that I can actually search for links by the snide remarks and useless tags I gave them. Unobtrusive, lean, neat, just my type of thing.
If it weren’t for the fact that the application is PowerPC only. Which literally makes it one of the very few processes on my system requiring the Rosetta emulation (of those I regularly use the only other one is the pearLyrics Dashboard widget which serves to prove two things: one that a reasonably good Dashboard widget will require more than JavaScript and two that the music ‘industry’ mainly wants to inconvenience their customers as apparently development of the widget was stopped due to some rabid lawyers). As delimport is open source software, I was quick to download the source long ago (which was a royal PITA due to open source projects’ tendency to not provide simple download links) and hoped to make it a universal binary in no time.
Unfortunately that didn’t work. Somehow the CURLHandle framework used by delimport to handle the downloading wasn’t available in a Universal version while looking rather abandoned as far as development went. To me it looks like the problem came from commands run in some build-phases to get the linking right, which failed for Intel (or so). I.e. a problem which I didn’t even understand properly and which I couldn’t fix. Back then I gave up and settled for making delimport’s Spotlight importer universal because Spotlight importers needed to be native to the processor to work at the time (I think by now Spotlight will be smart enough to just spawn Rosetta based importing process if PPC importers are to be used, but initially it didn’t).
But eventually I realised that probably that framework was only used for downloading and that in principle Cocoa’s classes should be able to do that as well. So, recently, I had another look at it, kicked the framework out (thus reducing the application’s size as well – it’d be really small if it didn’t contain that gigantic Keychain framework which provides all or at least loads of keychain related features when we all we need is getting or setting a password) and replaced it by some of Cocoa’s methods.
A bit of extra tweaking (delicious wants you to send a non-generic User Agent string; occasionally the server connection just fails these days and gives a zero-length response but no error, which was worth working around) later, the tool worked natively on Intel and I have been running it on my machine for a while now.
But what next? I thought it’d be a good idea to ‘contribute’ the changes back to the project. But I didn’t manage to successfully contact the original author so far. Not that I’m particularly keen on that open source stuff – people might dare to criticise my incompetent work after all or question the necessity of throwing in some localised strings so a Don't
can become a Don’t
– but giving back those changes seems like a good thing here.
Finally I have to remark that at first I was shocked by what delimport actually does: It checks whether there are any new changes to your bookmarks on delicious and if there are it downloads all of your bookmarks. That easily amounts to a multi-hundred kilobyte download every single time you add a tiny new bookmark. Which seems clumsy and excessive.
I had a look at the documentation for delicious’ API to see how this could be improved and it turned out that the API is so weak that this method is the only way to do the job properly. None of the other API functions let you see whether old bookmarks have been edited or deleted. Only getting the full set of bookmarks and comparing them to the set you already have will be up to that job. And while I’m a fan of efficiency, I’m an even bigger fan of doing these things properly and keeping the local copy of the bookmarks as synchronised as possible. So delicious will have to shoulder those additional downloads.
