Dumble Update #3

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Alright, time for another Dumble update. For those tuning in late, Dumble is a web-app that auto-magically creates a tumblelog out of someone’s delicious bookmarks. More background in this introductory post from last November.

So what’s been cooking since the last Dumble update which was all the way back in December? For starters, Dumble’s source code repository is now online so you can follow Dumble’s progress as it happens!

Looking at the changes since December, apart from the bug-fixes and speedup related commits, I’ve added support for three more sites — Metacafe, Twitter and Wikipedia — while improving support for Amazon. While the Metacafe support just relies on the standard video embed widget, the Twitter and Wikipedia support leverages their respective APIs.

There are a few minor UI changes. You can find a feed subscription link to the currently viewed user’s delicious bookmarks.

Finally, there’s one change explicitly to support embedding of Dumble on other websites. Let’s say you have a website and wish to have your own copy of Dumble running over there tumbling your delicious bookmarks. One way to do this is to just copy all the Dumble code and host it on your site. While I’m perfectly happy if you do that, there is a drawback to that approach. As and when I make any changes to Dumble, you’ll have to keep up by modifying your copy of Dumble.

An easier way is to just embed http://antrix.net/dumble/ onto your site. Just copy the following HTML snippet into an index.html file and place it somewhere on your website. Be sure to modify the delicious username and optionally the tag parameters.

<html>
<head>
    <title>Dumble : auto tumble your delicious links</title>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
    <style type="text/css" media="screen">
    html, body {
        margin: 0;
        padding: 0;
        border: 0;
        outline: 0;
    }
    </style>
</head>
<body>
<iframe src="http://antrix.net/dumble/?u=USERNAME&t=TAG&title=My delicious tumblelog" height="100%" width="100%" frameborder="0" scrolling="auto">
Since your browser doesn't support IFrames, please <a href="http://antrix.net/dumble/?u=Ravages">visit Dumble directly</a>.
</iframe>
</body>
</html>

Did you notice the title parameter in the iframe src URI? That’s something I added just to enhance this kind of embedding of Dumble. The value of that title parameter will become the window/browser title.

You can see an example of such an embedded Dumble over on Selective Amnesia. In industry parlance, this would be called a reference installation. ;-)

As usual, please test Dumble on your browser/OS combo and let me know of any stuff that breaks. The Wikipedia support is especially hacky and I would appreciate some feedback on that. :)

☙