Incoherent mumblings
Posts tagged ‘epilicious’
I was getting too many reports of problems on using epilicious together with del.icio.us. What finally did it was Gnome bug #491977. The patch provided was applied in the 2.20 tree. In the current development tree I simply removed support for del.icio.us alltogether. It’s just not worth the hassle!
It’s just somewhat unfortunate that the name of the plugin doesn’t fit that well anymore.
My epilicious.dev repo now has changes adding support for ma.gnolia. The configuration dialogue is modified to allow changing between the two supported backends.
Furthermore my APT repo holds an updated version of epiphany-extension-epilicious-pre that can be installed alongside the GNOME version of epilicious that comes in epiphany-extensions. That is, it can be used with Epiphany 2.18 from Debian experimental.
As always, comments and bug report are more than welcome.
As I’ve said before del.icio.us is not easy to program against. Here’s a brief recount of my latest explorations into how to program against del.icio.us.
I received a report about some problems with epilicious, to which I responded with a pointer to my post about my past experiences. In response I got a suggestion to pick apart the “official” Firefox plugin for del.icio.us. It turned up some interesting details. AFAICS they are using the API in an undocumented way!
First of all every single request is a POST rather than a GET. The data they send is _user=<cookie>. That cookie is retrieved from Firefoxes cookie jar; it’s set after the user logs in at https://secure.del.icio.us/login. Apparently this allows them to use cookie:cookie as the username and password for Basic Authentication. Also, every request has src=ffbmext1.4.27 as an argument in the URI (1.4.27 is the current version of their plugin). There’s also an undocumented “function” for getting only the hashes of the bookmarks at https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/hashes?. The maybe most interesting detail is that they don’t seem to bother with the threat of throttling at all!
Hopeful that this might offer a way around the increasingly erratic behaviour of the API I played around with python. No luck though! A few hours of investigation, some quick hacking and long testing (once you’re throttled it takes a LONG time for del.icio.us to let you back in, sometimes more than 10 minutes!!) later I found myself not being able to hold back on profanities. The API usage description is a joke! Programming against something like that is little better than programming Windows based on MSDN 
It seem the official plugin can get away with disregarding throttling because all interaction with del.icio.us happens with user interaction between each call. It takes a very fast user to trigger the throttling.
I can understand that del.icio.us wasn’t designed to be used a base for synchronising bookmarks, the throttling clearly shows that. However, one second between requests is not enough to avoid throttling and there is no indication on how long one remains in a throttled state.
This exercise has pushed me to put more energy into looking for alternative backends for epilicious. So far ma.gnolia seems good and I’d like to add support for Google bookmarks as well.
As I’ve told before del.icio.us can be a very fickle partner to interact with. Lately I’ve again started seeing obstinate behaviour from del.icio.us and yesterday I finally got around to adding support for ma.gnolia.com to epilicious. They support an API that is “del.icio.us compatible” (I believe there are some things missing, but everything epilicious needs is there) so adding the feature was extremely simple.
So far it’s not quite complete, there is no GUI to change the backend store you’ll have to interact with GConf directly, other parts of the GUI lie by still referring to del.icio.us even though ma.gnolia.com is being used. However, the backend is working and the only problem so far seems to be that ma.gnolia.com returns badly formatted XML at times (still haven’t investigated it thoroughly to say anything definite).
I haven’t pushed the changes into any of my repos yet. The only way to get it is by using the epiphany-extension-epilicious-pre package in my APT repo. Debian Sid users can simply install the package, others will have to use the source.
I’ve been sitting on a few changes for a while now and now I’ve finally rolled them into a release version. Get it in the normal place.
GNOME bug #352082 has been closed and Epilicious is now to be found in GNOME SVN.
The only change is the addition of a translation to Esperanto (thanks Antono Vasiljev).
In related news, it seems like Fedore might be getting some Epilicious goodness coming its way. The packager also pointed out that the utility library (libepilicious) probably shouldn’t be installed in Epiphany’s extension library. Its location is now configurable at install time.
I’ve switched from bzr to darcs for all my version management needs. I’ve decided to also move my already existing projects to darcs. First out is epilicious. From now on the following should be used to get the release and development branches respectively:
% darcs get http://therning.org/magnus_darcs/epilicious
% darcs get http://therning.org/magnus_darcs/epilicious.dev
I decided not to take any history with me, I could have used tailor but decided not to, after all this is a very small project. Also, I’m keeping the old history for the time being, it’s in the old place:
% bzr get http://www.therning.org/magnus_bzr/epilicious/
% bzr get http://www.therning.org/magnus_bzr/epilicious.dev/
I just received a trackback for my epilicious page. James (who I don’t know at all) apparently tried out epilicious, but didn’t end up using it, instead he wrote deliciony. So, anyone who’s looking at epilicious, but finds it not quite to their liking, maybe it’s worth checking out.
I just have to tell you James that I would have loved hearing what makes you say that epilicious is “prone to bugs” and exactly what you tried getting it to do. Without knowing that I can’t improve on it. Especially since I’m having no problems at all with epilicious and haven’t had for months now. But hey! Since I’m the author of the thing I would have made some changes if it weren’t delivering for me. 
