Anti Social

A few blog entries ago I said I was going to implement a tool that used the del.icio.us API to find related pages.

Well - I haven't done it, but not just because I'm lazy. The del.icio.us API doesn't actually allow you to fetch information about specific URLs. There is a 'web interface' - but to read it from a program requires screen scraping, which isn't supported. Basically Joshua Schacter (the founder of del.icio.us) is worried that exposing information per URL in the API will cause a lot more traffic to his server. I asked him if he'd share his data with me so that I could do it and he replied :

There is already a way for users to see what the tags are for a given URL.

I am preparing to roll out a recommendation engine shortly, as well; it is why I built the site in the first place.

In other words - clear off, that's my idea .

Two days later the following announcement appeared on the mailing list :

I just released the recommendation engine.

Any of your tags with 10 or more items will offer recommendations; clicking it will show you five related tags where you are likely to find new stuff, and five urls it thinks you might categorize under that tag.

Not exactly what I had in mind - but hey maybe I contributed towards accelerating web development .

ConfigObj 4.00beta2

ConfigObj 4 is officially released into the wild. It even has it's own entry in the Python Cheeseshop.

I made a brief note here a couple of days ago saying that the new version was available - but that we hadn't resolved packaging issues so I wasn't doing an announcement. That got picked up by Daily-Python - so this release is beta 2 [1].

A few downloads already.

Python Stuff

I think this is the longest I've been without blogging for quite some time. It's probably a good thing .

I'm worried about PyZine. They're supposed to be quarterly - but in the last six months they've managed three quarters of an issue. ZopeMag hasn't done much better sigh.

My worry partly stems from the fact that I've got two unpublished articles with them - and I've been concerned that airing worries like this is unhelpful (?) (which is why I've left it so long). They're not taking on new subscribers - muttering about unexplained 'difficulties', which has to be a very bad sign for a commercial undertaking.

I worry because I think Python needs PyZine [2] - and it's a shame to see it languish. The PyZine team are also heavily involved in setting up OpenSourceExperts [3], so hopefully things are still moving....

In the meanwhile maybe I'll start writing for DevShed.

• Front page
• All By Date
• All By Category
• Blog Statistics
• Twitter
• RSS Feed
• Return to Top
• 

Technorati...
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 License.