The social-bookmarking site del.icio.us is a deeply influential site, credited by many for jump-starting the immense amount of activity around tagging.
The main resources of importance in del.icio.us (http://del.ico.us
) are bookmarks, that is, URLs. You can associate tags with a given URL and look at an individual’s collection of URLs and the tags they use. In this section, I again explain the URL structures by browsing through the site and noting the corresponding URLs.
You can look at the public bookmarks for a specific user (such as rdhyee) here:
http://del.icio.us/{user-id}
For example:
You can see all the bookmarks of a user by tag here:
http://del.icio.us/{user-id}/{tag}
For example:
http://del.icio.us/rdhyee/NYTimes
You can see all the URLs that people have tagged with a given tag here:
http://del.icio.us/tag/{tag}
You can see just the popular URLs associated with the tag here:
http://del.icio.us/popular/{tag}
You can access today’s popular items here:
You can access just the newest popular ones here:
http://del.icio.us/popular/?new
Correlating a URL to a del.icio.us page is a bit trickier. Consider the following URL:
http://harpers.org/TheEcstasyOfInfluence.html
which you can reference from del.icio.us here:
http://del.icio.us/url/53113b15b14c90292a02c24b55c316e5
So, how do you get 53113b15b14c90292a02c24b55c316e5
from http://harpers.org/TheEcstasyOfInfluence.html
? The answer is that the identifier is an md5 hash of the URL. In Python, the following line of code:
md5.new("http://harpers.org/TheEcstasyOfInfluence.html").hexdigest()
or the following PHP code:
<?php $url = "http://harpers.org/TheEcstasyOfInfluence.html"; print md5($url); ?>
yields 53113b15b14c90292a02c24b55c316e5
.
Note that the following:
http://del.icio.us/url?url=http://harpers.org/TheEcstasyOfInfluence.html
also does work and redirects to the following: