Dumble

28 May 2008 · #techtalk

Have you heard of tumblelogs? The Wikipedia definition today reads:

A tumblelog is a variation of a blog, that favors short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging. Common post formats found on tumblelogs include links, photos, quotes, dialogues, and video.

Popular and genre defining tumblelogs include Anarchaia and projectionist. My own Tidbits is an attempt at creating a tumblelog. However, I found that much of my tumbling is split between my del.icio.us linker and the Tidbits. Which led me to think if it was possible to create a tumblelog out of my delicious linker.

Dumble is born out of that thinking. Dumble takes any user’s delicious links and tries to format the links in a form more suited for a tumblelog. For example, if the link is to a Youtube video, then Dumble automatically embeds the video in the page. Same goes for a link to a Flickr photo - the photo is inserted into the page. Take a look at my dumble, you’ll get the idea.

Right now, special posts are created for links to Youtube, Google Video, College Humor videos, Flickr, Amazon and IMDb. The IMDb bit is interesting. I’ve been saving movie ratings on delicious for some time now and some of you started it too after I wrote about it here. So if Dumble finds a rating in the notes field (in the x/y format), it’ll automatically substitute the rating with the appropriate number of stars!

Please give Dumble a spin and let me know what you think. Especially IE users since I’ve done zero testing on IE! If you find a bug, let me know and I’ll boot to Windows (ugh!) and see what’s breaking. Safari users, Dumble works okay in Konqueror so I’m guessing it’ll be okay in Safari too.

I intend to add special post formatting for more sites periodically but there’s a technical limitation to what’s possible. Which brings me to:

=== Technical Bits ===

Just like Recently, Dumble is a pure Javascript affair with no server side logic involved. Well, at least none on my server ;-) It fetches JSON from delicious and flickr and whereever else possible. Which is kinda the limitation at the moment. For any more complex post creation, I need to fetch the actual page being linked to but since cross domain GET isn’t allowed in the browser’s security model, I’m stuck :-( I think I’ll give up on my pure-JS ambitions and put in a dummy proxy on antrix.net for XMLHTTPRequests. That will allow for more special posts like a Wikipedia summary generator, etc.

My current todo list for Dumble includes back button support and keyboard navigation (like gmail/g-reader/bloglines). If you have any feature requests or comments on implementation, please let me know!