fbartho.com

Delicious Tag Project

I've been pretty interested in tagging projects for several years. I think the first time I had ideas about writing tag-related code projects was back in 2004. I've written about various ideas for a tagging filesystem and how sweet such a thing would be if it was fast. Realities of life got in the way in the past, but now the ideas that had been simmering are coming to the surface.

This project is currently still growing, but as a first pass I decided to focus on Del.icio.us which is a great bookmark service that is all about tagging and the finding of new things to see and read based on the keywords they are associated with.

This is possible through the pretty clean API documented in the help guides

To interact with that API I was happy to find that a group had already put together a package via PEAR to access the api from PHP. Available: here.

I had update about half the code to add some new parameters to most of the API calls. Additionally I had to add a few new api methods, and while I was at it I made it possible for the script to self-throttle in the case that a user was violating the api requirement of a max of 1 api call per second. Previously the code would just error out in that case, which while technically following the spec, isn't particularly helpful to clients for the API

For the visualization side of things, I currently plan to interface with code from The Javascript Information Toolkit which is a project that brought together several useful visualization frameworks for charts (and other data) in such a way the data can be animated cleanly and clearly while being highly interactive (if that's your goal). I highly recommend that anyone with a spare moment goes to check it out. The animations and interaction demos you can play with there look very polished.