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2004/12/30

Durl released as public domain source code

Filed under: English, web Robin @ 05:57 (9744 lectures)

I learned a few things this week about timing, simplicity and popularity. It all begun with a simple script called Durl I introduced 2004/12/20. It gained enough popularity to show up on http://del.icio.us/popular/ and now stands at about 200 links pointing to Durl. It served about 5000 different queries, but only about 175 RSS queries.

At about noon on 2004/12/27, slashdot joined the ball with a rather controversial article. The unfortunate result was not much of the discussion had to do with Durl, del.icio.us or social bookmarks. A day later, Durl made it on DayPop. It didn’t even have an html or body tag, but it evolved to something a little more proper. Enough so I could release Durl into the public domain, no warranties implied or otherwise ;)

This little experiment has the merit of uncovering an interest for reverse searches, something Xanadu had from the start and most Wikis get right. In fact, Josha will be providing an RSS feed through del.icio.us itself, rendering the current Durl completely irrelevant. That’s actually some great news – and I have other plans, of course, starting with a little popularity graph (maybe a sparkline) I plan to implement later tonight.

There have been lots of comments all over the place, here are a few pointers:

I’ve tried to address most questions: source is now available; yes, Durl isn’t much compared to del.icio.us; no, I can’t easily query for domain urls, but maybe Joshua can from his end; and no, I wouldn’t have posted this to slashdot myself.

All in all, the timing was pretty good. With many people taking a break, Durl was able to gain a lot of popularity in little time. Which reminds me of a company called “Eight days”. They got their name after hitting a million visits on their site in only 8 days. You probably know Am I hot or not, yes?

10 Comments »

  1. yup you turned up on
    as well.

    Comment by mackinaw — 2004/12/30 @ 09:34

  2. Duh! I just realised I blacklisted my own name, email, ip and url and my comments were just deleted… anyway.
    I didn’t link here to all the comments Durl got – you’ll have to go digging a little yourself, but I’ve made that really easy by now – just use Durl ;)
    Speaking of which, I just finished the implementation of the trend history graph, using sparkline. It’s doing rather crude scaling right now, but it works…

    Comment by Robin — 2004/12/30 @ 10:08

  3. Robin,

    I appreciate too your Durl and use it.

    Please check also Bloglines Citations to see other blogs about Durl:
    http://www.bloglines.com/citations?url=http%3A%2F%2Frym.waglo.com%2Fwordpress&submit=Search

    Carmen

    Comment by Carmen Holotescu — 2004/12/30 @ 12:42

  4. Thanks Boris!
    Boris gave me a hand by setting up my delicious “mycomments” feed to show up on the top right-hand side. I’m happy because finally I think the cool thing about this is to use it as a way of blogging,…

    Trackback by mtl3p — 2004/12/31 @ 12:41

  5. Thanks, Carmen. I added a bunch of “backlink” tools, see for yourself on your Durl page (Carmen Holotescu). Thanks for the tip ;)

    Comment by Robin — 2005/01/02 @ 07:59

  6. Hi, Robin,

    Thank you for the note and for posting my weblog to your delicious collection.

    It is strange that this is the very first appearance of my weblog at delicious; I use delicious also to build the categories for my weblog, posting the blogs under specific tags – http://del.icio.us/cami13/Search_Tools is an example, but none of these appears when searching with Durl.

    Thanks,
    Carmen

    Comment by Carmen Holotescu — 2005/01/02 @ 09:46

  7. Robin,

    I kind suggestion: Blogdigger Link Search – http://www.blogdigger.com/linkSearchForm.jsp ( RSS is created too ) to be added to backlink tools.

    Carmen

    Comment by Carmen Holotescu — 2005/01/02 @ 10:00

  8. I tried bcheck on Durl, one of your latest bookark that was relatively popular. Seems to work. Durl will only show pages that have been bookmarked thru del.icio.us first, and there is a cache in effect. The time varies, but can be seen at the bottom of Durl.
    Oh, I added blogdigger, thanks again :)

    Comment by Robin — 2005/01/02 @ 13:09

  9. You should make a “DURL this!” bookmarklet.

    Comment by Seb — 2005/01/04 @ 12:57

  10. Durl

    RSS feed for del.icio.us URL queries
    Information about people who delicious’ed it. del.icio.us already provides this service, Durl completes that with an RSS feed containing those results and trend history graphs.
    …

    Trackback by zone41 — 2006/01/31 @ 21:19

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