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Sunday, October 01, 2006

Descriptious: Popular del.icio.us links with descriptions included

I think del.icio.us/popular is more relevant to me than Digg. For example, I learned about GTD through del.icio.us. Digg seems to be more about interesting and unusual happenings, whereas I'm more interested in cool tools for tech and life.

Populicious is a great summary of popular del.icio.us links, with no repeats. The problem is that the Populicious feed does not have any descriptions, so you just have the title to go by, and this is often not helpful (e.g. "Articles").

So I've created a feed that takes the Populicious feed and adds descriptions, culled from the "user notes" from del.icio.us. It's called Descriptious.

(Note that I had created a similar Descriptious feed in the past, but it fell into disuse and stopped working. So I rewrote it from scratch in PHP. Source code.)

5 Comments:

  • Very nice, thanks for making this.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 10/01/2006 9:27 p.m.  

  • Anon--my pleasure!

    By Blogger Jonathan, at 10/01/2006 9:58 p.m.  

  • Hi Jon,

    Very good idea. The titles are rarely enough to go on, even just to tell if you've read it before or not.

    I know it's the perrenial complaint of long-time users of an online service but don't you find that del.icio.us/popular has really gone downhill? (Better than digg, yes, but then there's a joke in our office that the archetypal digg story is, "grep man page found!")

    I tried to get only "the good stuff" from del.icio.us/popular by thresholding the feed with my very popular feed. But actually that seems to identify exactly the stuff I don't want to see. Perhaps I'll try the inverse.

    Currently I'm getting better (but rather tightly focused) stuff from programming.reddit.com but even that is hardly wall-to-wall quality. I want the old del.icio.us/popular back!

    Anyway, nice idea. I may nick your code and combine it with mine for "nearly de.scrip.tio.us" (or something with similary mashed up name) for a feed WITH descriptions and WITHOUT the very popular stuff!!!

    By Blogger Thomas David Baker, at 10/02/2006 3:02 a.m.  

  • Hi bakert--heh--well, we'll see how it goes. I read your "very popular feed" post and sounds like del.icio.us/popular gives too many results. If so, I will need to subscribe to your "very popular feed".

    By Blogger Jonathan, at 10/02/2006 9:15 p.m.  

  • I hacked in the "less than" instead of "greater than" option. I'm not sure it's any better, but it's there!

    http://bluebones.net/2006/10/not-so-popular/

    By Blogger Thomas David Baker, at 10/09/2006 4:01 p.m.  

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