More Scrumptious
After playing some more with Scrumptious, I discovered that the features for adding and removing tags weren’t working very well.
(For those interested in technical details, it seems that the problem was that I was loading the tags that the user has for a URI from the RSS feed into an RDF data source. Then I was manipulating the data source in memory as the user added/removed tags. But apparently in-memory modification doesn’t work on a remote data source, so the list of tags wasn’t changing. And since this list is used with every update, if you added two tags, the second add would overwrite the first one, among other problems. I fixed this by copying all of the user’s bookmarks into an in-memory data source, which can be manipulated just fine using the RDF API.)
Besides fixing this, I also added a couple of new features. Firstly, the list of tags now displays not just all popular tags for the current page, but also any tags that you have used. This way you can remove tags from your bookmark even if they aren’t popular. Secondly, I added a text box at the bottom of the form that you can use to add new tags as free text, so you aren’t limited to adding popular tags. To use this, just type the name of the tag you want to add into the text box and click the Add button.
There is one remaining problem, which is that del.icio.us takes a long time to update the RSS feed for your bookmarks. This doesn’t matter as long as you leave the Scrumptious sidebar open, since I load the bookmark feed once at the beginning and then make further changes in memory, so the list stays up-to-date. But if you go to a page, add a couple of tags, close the sidebar and reopen it, the bookmark feed is reloaded and you might not see your changes. The worst part is that if you then add another tag, your original changes will be lost. I’ll try to find out why this is and whether there is a reasonable workaround. In the meantime, if you close and reopen the sidebar, make sure that the list of tags for the current page is correct before making any further changes to it.
The new version can be installed by clicking on the link in the original Scrumptious post. If you are using the sidebar and encounter any other bugs, please let me know and I’ll do my best to fix them.
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Hey there! I just installed Scrumptious, and I noticed a minor bug: when you try to order the tags according to their count, the ordering is made on the first digit only. Also the Alt+S shortcut conflicts with the Sage extension
Anyway congrats for this very cool app!
Comment by seber — 2/23/2005 @ 1:32 pm
Thanks, Sebastien. I think the sorting problem is due to the fact that it interprets the count as a string, not a number. Shouldn’t be difficult to fix. I’ll deal with the keyboard shortcut as well… I’m not sure whether Mozilla let’s you specify an alternate in case of conflict. Finally, Joshua (of del.icio.us) pointed out I could solve the RSS refresh problem by using their API instead to load the user’s bookmarks. I already started working on that. Pretty swamped with other stuff but I’m planning to get a new version out next week.
Comment by Matt — 2/24/2005 @ 10:39 am