Behind the slashdot wave, and am I del.icio.us?

Posted by Neil Crosby on December 27, 2004 08:35 PM

Tarnation! The one time that I could have written about something before it got slashdotted (about a week before in this case, go figure) and I didn’t because I didn’t think that the service in question was, well, good enough.

Durl is a del.icio.us extension which looks to see how many times a URL has been added to del.icio.us. and who added it. The problem is, the exact same functionality is provided already by del.icio.us, although it’s not exactly obvious. All you need to do it go to http://del.icio.us/url?url=your-url, and you’ll end up with a nice list of who added your particular URL to del.icio.us, when they added it, and what tags they used. The only extension to this which Durl had when I tested it a week ago (it’s temporarily disabled due to the slashdot effect) was that it was also produce an RSS feed.

Obviously, Durl is a useful tool, but since the functionality which it provides is already built into del.icio.us, a simple bookmarklet on your own computer would happily do the same job. The one which I wrote works happily for me in both Gecko browsers and Internet Explorer.

javascript:location.href='http://del.icio.us/url?url='+escape(location.href)

Just add this to your bookmarks (okaying through any questions that IE asks you), and click on it any time that you’re on a page that you’d like to know the del.icio.us URL information for. If you get given a page that doesn’t contain any del.icio.us urls, then this means that no-one has added this url to del.icio.us yet.

I call this bookmarklet “Am I del.icio.us?”. It’s nice and simple, and it gets the job done.

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