IM2 | OQP

A long long time ago I wrote a utility for del.icio.us to get the history of posts in RSS, provide a little trend graphic and link to a bunch of other utilities for URLs. Durl was born, it even got slashdotted (I might even add, when slashdot jumped the shark) but a few months later del.icio.us itself was providing an RDF feed of the posts history. Then sometime last year my tools server went down, taking with it the wall of music, sparktags, hot off the wiki and a bunch more stuff.

Honestly, I don’t have real plans to resuscitate that box and last week, I got a request for Durl. Turns out, people missed my del.icio.us graphics. While I didn’t want to rewrite Durl, I thought a little bit of code that could turn the del.icio.us RDF feed into a sparkline would be all I needed. But I didn’t want to worry about hosting…

I already knew about Joe Gregorio’s sparkline web service so next I looked for a Javascript RDF parser, pretty sure such a thing would exist. That’s when I found the Simple javascript RDF Parser and query thingy by Jim Ley. I also have the bits to take care of RSS 2.0 feeds but I’ve not implemented that yet. I also need to parse Atom… and what else? Anyway, doing this in Javascript opens the doors to a bunch of possibilities. I’m so not sure where this is going to take me next.

Anyhow, I’ve got a small demo of sparklines for del.icio.us / RDF. Turns out I still need to host a bit of PHP to act as a proxy to fetch the del.icio.us feed or any other RDF feed. I’ve got to fix URL encoding and until then, some URL just won’t work (with queries or other strange characters).

If you have a wordpress blog, your RDF feed is probably at http://example.com/wp-rdf.php or similar. For this blog, it’s at http://rym.waglo.com/wordpress/wp-rdf.php. Or you can enter any URL that was bookmarked a few times at del.icio.us and see a graphic for that URL posting history. The graphic is read from left to right, older to current period where the height represents the number of postings in that period. Red lines indicate periods of high activity. The duration of a period depends on the number of bins and the elapsed time between the first and last feed items.

Questions, ideas, suggestions?