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).