How Do I Use Delancey?
You will need a del.icio.us account to use Delancey. If you don't have one, please register for del.icio.us now.
Now go to Delancey, enter your del.icio.us username, and pick one of your tags to display.
Demo:
If you'd like to see how Delancey works but don't have your own del.icio.us account, check out the Delancey demonstration. The URL counts and short names will be reset every few minutes.
When you are ready to use your own name, please be sure to bookmark the Delancey Homepage, not the permalink to the demostration page.
Display Names:
Delancey can store a short name for your bookmark. These names are stored separately from the del.icio.us bookmark names, so feel free to use anything you like. To edit the name just click on the bookmark count.
Permalinks:
To quickly return to a username and tag in Delancey keep a bookmark to the "Permalink."
Advanced Usage:
If you are a long-term del.icio.us user, then you will no doubt already have plenty of bookmarks. However, you may not have been using del.icio.us to bookmark the sites you visit every day. Now is a good time to add your favorite sites to del.icio.us.
Consider tagging your favorite sites with a unique keyword and use this tag as your primary Delancey view. I recommend the tag "delancey", if only so we can see what is popular among all of us.
Caching:
All del.icio.us requests are cached for several minutes so as not to put load on the del.icio.us servers. You will see a delay between changes you make in del.icio.us and when they appear on Delancey.
Delancey It! Bookmarklet:
The "Delancey It" Bookmarklet can be dragged to your browser toolbar. Use this bookmarklet to easily tag your favorite pages with the word "delancey".
Claims:
You can claim your del.icio.us username in order to prevent other people from using it and increment your bookmark counts. Simply enter a valid del.icio.us username and click on the "Claim" link. You will be asked to pick a Delancey password and then verify that you are that user on del.icio.us.
How Does Delancey Work?
Delancey doesn't make a copy of your del.icio.us bookmarks, it just stores additional information about them. Your bookmarks are all stored on the del.icio.us server, and the counts and the display names are stored on the Delancey server. Since Delancey doesn't know your del.icio.us password, Delancey can't modify your del.icio.us bookmarks in any way.
The username you enter into Delancey is used to fetch the public list of your last 100 bookmarks from del.icio.us. Delancey extracts a list of the tags you've associated with those 100 bookmarks and uses this list to populate the tag autocomplete box.
When you click on a bookmark, a message is sent to the Delancey server to increment the counter. This counter is returned by the Delancey server when you fetch your bookmarks.
Note that that requests to del.icio.us are cached for 5 minutes so as to reduce load on del.icio.us servers. Thus there may be a delay between adding a bookmark to del.icio.us and seeing the changes appear on Delancey.
Privacy:
Delancey asks for your del.icio.us username only to retrieve your list of bookmarks and to stake claims. These bookmarks are retrieved via the public del.icio.us feed APIs. Neither your username nor your bookmarks are stored permanently on the Delancey server, and they will not be used for anything other to fetch the page. The bookmark counts and usernames are stored in the Delancey database using a one-way hashes that your browser computes.
Security:
Delancey does not know your del.icio.us password and can not write to your del.icio.us account, so there is no danger of your original bookmarks being corrupted. And if you claim your Delancey username, only you can read or write to the bookmark click counts.
For Developers:
There will be a follow-up article on the creation of Delancey, including links to all of the source code.
Bugs:
Delancey is known to work on Firefox 1.0, Firefox 1.5, Internet Explorer 6.0, and Safari 2.0. Support for additional browsers will be added as time permits. Currently, using access keys rather than explicit mouse clicks fails to increment counts on both Safari and IE.
If you find additional bugs or have suggestions on how to improve Delancey, please comment on this post.
More information:
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