Trying Scuttle for Bookmarks

After seeing this short-but-sweet post from Phil, I figured Scuttle sounds really interesting. I am frequently annoyed at how often del.icio.us is slow, barely responsive, or even down altogether. This isn’t to fault the service – it’s free and I have no place to complain. But it is annoying. So off I went.

I have now downloaded Scuttle 0.1.0 and managed to get it working. I say managed only because there was some tweaking involved to get it going on my system. It was actually functional pretty quickly (well, once I set the database and user information), but I found some other annoyances along the way that I fixed for presentation purposes.

First, import.php. The import process didn’t work for me. I suspect it doesn’t work for anyone, since the project page lists this as a bug. The problem appears to be the check for the cookie. Simple changing $_COOKIE[poke] to $_COOKIE[“scuttle”] did the trick on my system.

Next, I received messages about headers already being sent. This is because there are some echo statements in there that send output to the screen prior to sending a header, so PHP chokes a bit. I also didn’t like how the query information was sent to the screen. Personal choice, really – I just didn’t want it, even though it worked okay. So I commented the two echo statements. The import worked!

Finally, I don’t intend on opening this service up to everyone (though it may happen one day), so I removed references to registering in both about.php and toolbar.inc.php. I also removed register.php in case anyone decided to try to hit it manually.

The end result is nice. I like the interface way better than that of del.icio.us – it’s just prettier. Plus, being on my server, it seems to work most of the time, and when it doesn’t, I (theoretically) can do something about that, as well as back up the data when needed. I also like that you can mark bookmarks private, and that if I add a bookmark it takes me back to the Scuttle interface – not to the page I just entered. Thanks, Marcus!

It could use some (more) enhancements, but again since I’m in control, I can do that. Notably, I’d like to be able to search multiple tags, like with del.icio.us (that is, select a tag, then see all available sub-selections to further refine the search). That would be cool. A change password function would be nice, but is by no means necessary. I don’t have any other ideas at the moment, but I suspect I will. I’ll keep you posted.

One note – if you need to get your del.icio.us bookmarks, try this link to export them.

Update: Scuttle supports multiple tag display (for instance, tag1+tag2, as with del.icio.us). What it does not (appear to) do is to give you a list of available tags to add to the current selection. I think that would be a nice feature to have.

Update: I also updated index.php by moving the logout function above the HTML output. This prevents the error about headers already being sent when you logout (and actually allows you to logout).


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5 responses to “Trying Scuttle for Bookmarks”

  1. Julian Avatar

    Re 3 – yes it certainly looks like entities – mostly caused by double quote in the delicious comments field. taking those out by hand seems to have fixed the problem.

    A similar problem cropped up today when it caused the (different) PHP code that includes my recent delicious links into my blog front page (by parsing the delicious RSS feed) to fall over claiming a badly-formed feed.

    I wonder if this is the same bit of PHP XML-handling library being used? More digging required I suspect – not to mention a bit more reading-up on XML.

  2. Shantanu Oak Avatar

    I had not seen such a useful and working open source software since a long time!

  3. Chad Everett Avatar

    Nice catch – his file was larger than that (and I didn’t notice it). The “invalid query” may have something to do with entities (specifically quotes) in the data. Peter has some inside his XML file, but it’s being processed as quotes by the Scuttle import.

  4. Julian Avatar

    What size is your XML file? There’s a hard coded limit in import.php of 30000 characters. I was getting the same error, editing the file down cured it.

    Now however I’m getting the import falling over after importing two lines with an “invalid query” error…

  5. Peter Avatar

    Hrm, when I run the import script (after applying your fixes) I get the message “Could not open XML input”. I *did* specify a file in the browse box, and it does exist, and is an XML file… not sure what the problem is. :-/