Archive for May, 2005
Two years ago, Joshua and I were discussing ideas for something very similar to del.icio.us. In fact, it was del.icio.us as Joshua wrote the first version shortly afterwards. The conversations and the pleasant pattern continued - I got to talk a lot, Joshua did all the actual work and every now and then, one of my suggestions would magically wind its way into the site.
Earlier this year, as Joshua was considering taking on investment and working on del.icio.us full-time, he asked me if I’d be interested in joining the yet-nonexistent company. I thoughtlessly said “Yeah, sure” much in the way you might say “Yeah, sure” if approached by a hobbyist musician friend and asked if you’d like to fly around the world and party on his private jet when he becomes a mega-rockstar.
This carelessness has cost me dearly as I now find myself at the del.icio.us office, krazy-glued to a lawnchair with no hope of escape until I implement the top 50 features demanded by del.icio.us users, starting with ‘free pony for every 100 bookmarks’.
May 24th, 2005
Scott Matthews’ Bitty Browser embeds a tiny browser within a your web page. It also allows browsing of a del.icio.us account or tag and is an neat way to embed your posted links within your blog or web page.
May 22nd, 2005
For years, I worked in Times Square. Corporate culture and the general urgency of work tended to foster a lunchtime environment that largely involved scampering outside for some take-out lunch and returning t eat alone at my desk. Or eating at the expensive cafeteria, which despite trying very hard, often failed to rise above miserable. I’d once gone down there to see if it had improved, and their Food of the World on that day was “New York Street Food.”
While there are some great restaurants in the area, the choices available were meager. Menus were hoarded and the names of the few good places were passed from person to person… but mostly we ate at Wendy’s.
I now find myself working near Union Square. The wonderful greenmarket, appearing three days a week, apparently inspires a great deal of excitement in the gastronomic profession. I’ve found amazing places every time I wander outside to feed myself.
The vast majority of our attentions, however, have been aimed at the Shake Shack. While the shakes and “St. Louis Style” concretes are great, it is the burgers that are not to be missed. We can hardly cross 22nd street without being drawn directly into its greasy gravitational field, hopefully not to be repelled by a daunting wait in the often enormous lines. The long wait does serve to provide time for our internal arguments regarding the pursuit of the Ideal Burger, and whether the Single Shack (better sauce to meat ratio) or the Double Shack (more meat) more closely approaches perfection.
After our exceedingly painful colo experience on Monday (two of the ten new machines are up now) we gave up and I decided to treat James, our friendly neighborhood bandwidth provider, to a Double Shack Burger in thanks for his long efforts.
A day later, he reports back: “I’ve been craving the Shake Shack all day. You awful man.”
May 18th, 2005
I’ve added a little bit of code to add a "Bookmark This" link on every post, next to the Comments link, which allows you to kick the user over to to the del.icio.us posting page. There are two pieces to this little hack.
First, you can link to http://del.icio.us/post with a GET argument of "url" containing the URL-encoded URL, and you can supply a title in the "title" field, similarly URL-encoded. This effectively lets you put something equivalent to del.icio.us’s "copy this" link somewhere offsite. The final URL should thus look like: http://del.icio.us/post?url=THEURL&title=THETITLE
Second, a bit of TypePad/MT hackery: In the appropriate place (I added it right after </MTIfAllowComments>) add the following to your Main Index and Individual Archive templates:
| <a href="http://del.icio.us/post?url=<$MTEntryPermalink$>&title=<$MTEntryTitle encode_url="1"$>">Bookmark This</a>
May 16th, 2005
In the two years that I’ve been running delicious, I’ve had to move the site to bigger and faster hardware every few months as it grew. Originally it ran on a little celeron machine that I use for all my various projects, and just a few months later, it moved to a very, very loud dual Xeon IBM intellistation, where it was happy for a while. unfortunately, I had chosen to go with FreeBSD 4, which caused a lot of problems with the MySQL backend.
In January of 2005, we moved moved to an HP sent to me by a friend, colocated in a real ISP somewhere in downtown Manhattan. I added to that an inexpensive single-CPU Dell for running apache and so on.
Once again we find ourselves out of hardware, so we have procured five new dual-Xeon servers from Dell and three new dual-Opteron machines from Sun. On Monday, we’ll be moving them to the colo facility. Hopefully in the coming weeks they’ll be online and the site will, once again, move to bigger and faster hardware.
May 13th, 2005
“hurrrrrr”
“whuh?”
“whelmed”
“buh?”
update: we also go “mrfl.” thanks ray!
update 2: “grn” is frequently uttered. thanks, john!
update 3: “hlagaglhalgahlghlag”
May 11th, 2005
In the interest of increasing communication with our users, I’ve decided launch ourselves into the blogosphere and begin a corporate blog. We’ll talk about del.icio.us, upcoming features, site status and cat pictures. We also will be using it as a showcase for our coming blog integration tools and to highlight some of the great stuff people have done with the API.
May 11th, 2005
