SlashLinks is out Today!

Tuesday, February 21 2006

Today I released SlashLinks over at the Eyebeam R&D. SlashLinks is a tool you install on your web host's machines (similar to Movable Type) that mirrors your del.icio.us links via the del.icio.us API. SlashLinks runs on Ruby on Rails.

Honestly, I developed SlashLinks because I wanted to put my del.icio.us links on my website in a fashion similar to the way del.icio.us displays them with the functionality of tags and archives (all intuitively navigable by URL). So, that's what I have now. My most recent links are at /links, my link archive is at /links/archive, and my links indexed by tag are at /links/tags.

So I think I've fairly transparently integrated SlashLinks into my blog -- which was the goal. I've also set up a vanilla instance of SlashLinks here to illustrate how it works out of the box. Since the core links, archive, and tags pages are styled via CSS, you can relatively easily change up the look of these core pages to get it to look like you want. If someone wanted to use SlashLinks as a stand alone link blog they might might style the site like this for example.

SlashLinks uses a bit of the ole AJAX to keep up-to-date with del.icio.us. When someone views your links (and after a user-defined check interval), SlashLinks will query del.icio.us via the API and grab your new links if you have any. If you do, the links will drop into the page without a reload. I think it's kinda cool. So to keep up-to-date all you (or your readers) have to do is view the links page every once and a while. Alternatively, you can log in to the SlashLinks configuration page and manually update.

There's a couple of examples of sites using SlashLinks at the project site. Hopefully there will be more sites added in the future.