del.icio.usly popular

Posted by Neil Crosby on February 21, 2005 09:58 AM

Yup, it’s time for another del.icio.us post. A week ago, on Valentine’s Day, Xabier Vázquez released a new tool for del.icio.us - the enticingly named pop.ulico.us.

The way that Xabier looks at the popular pages on del.icio.us is not as a ranking page, but a home page which he visits every morning when he first gets up. Because of the way that the del.icio.us popular pages are currently designed, he has to mentally filter out of his sight those pages which he has already seen. This would mean that some days he’d have lots of new pages to look at that he hadn’t seen before, whilst on other days, there’d be almost nothing new for him to look at at all.

So, pop.ulicio.us was born. The new tool has four main pages to it - new popular pages in the last 24 hours, new popular pages in the last 48 hours, most popular in the last 24 hours, and most popular of all time. The first two pages only show pages which the tool has not seen prior to that 24 hour/48 hour period, meaning that you’ll always get a nice fresh list of links to go and visit. “Most popular in the last 24 hours”, pretty much shows the same information as the del.icio.us popular page, except that it also shows whether that link has become more or less popular since the previous day. “Most popular of all time” does exactly what it says on the tin, except that “all time” began on 10th February 2005, when Xabier started collecting data.

When Xabier released the tool I immediately delished it, but I felt that it wasn’t quite ready for me to use on a day to day basis. Why? Because I’m lazy. I’m going through a period right now where I like to have RSS feeds for everything. I mentioned this on the “extended” line of my del.icio.us entry about the tool, and within a couple of days RSS feeds for each of the pages appeared. The pop.ulicio.us tool now takes a proud place in my RSS aggregator. Now, I’m sure that my little comment had absolutely nothing to do with getting the RSS feeds implemented, but it would be nice to think that Xabier was watching the del.icio.us links to his tools and saw the suggestion.

permalink | View blog reactions