The next version of SiteTagger will mostly be a shaping up of many of the features it already contains. I’ve had some good advice from Daniel Jalkut that I’ll finish implementing and I’ve had some ideas of my own based on his advice. The next version will be a bit smoother but mostly the same.

I do have one major new feature planned. SiteTagger already syncs well with web browsers (one of my favorite features) and it has rudimentary support for del.icio.us and Furl. Basically, you can import bookmarks from del.icio.us and Furl and send individual bookmarks to them. Fairly good but it could be better.

I should mention that SiteTagger is not a frontend for an online service. There are plenty of other bookmarking applications that do that. SiteTagger is its own thing but could benefit from better integration with online services. It already does pulling and pushing to some services. Now it’s going to have a syncing mechanism similar to browser syncing that makes it so much better.

I just hate using the APIs provided by online services.

The basic interface for interacting with web services is, I think, del.icio.us’s API. It is as basic as it can get. There’s a simple “pull-all” command that lets me get details for every bookmark on del.icio.us. I’d be much happier to have a “pull all since date” command that lets me get bookmarks since a date and anything that’s been modified. I could deal with less information and use less bandwidth.

Pushing bookmarks is more painful. del.icio.us only lets one bookmark at a time be pushed. This is tedious if several bookmarks are being added. To make matters worse, del.icio.us asks clients to wait at least 1 second between queries. This means that every bookmark takes upload time plus 1 second when added. If you want to upload your entire SiteTagger database at once, you could be letting the sync feature run for a while. Lord help you if you have multiple accounts with which you want to sync.

Update - I wrote the stuff below without having test anything. It was simply some brain droppings. I’ve since tested a bit and del.icio.us “just does the right thing.” Basically, if you try to add a bookmark that it thinks already exists, it updates the account. Perfect. I could (and will) ask for more but I’m glad the current API operates the way it does.

I’m still trying to figure out what to do about updating bookmark changes. del.icio.us doesn’t provide an API just for updating bookmarks. It’s entirely possible that re-adding an existing bookmark will take care of it. It’s much more likely that I’d have to delete the old bookmark and then add the new one. Not only tedious but also very costly in time terms. Now, updating a bookmark can take 2 seconds. I’ll just have to guess, check, and fix to figure what will happen.

I’m looking into adding support for ma.gnolia (del.icio.us was clever, ma.gnolia.com is just dumb). That API looks to be a bit more robust. I haven’t looked closely at it nor implemented anything for it but it’s on my to-do list. I’d like to support ma.gnolia before I ship the next version. We’ll see how it goes.