Scuttle – Create Your Own Del.icio.us Site

delicious open source alternativeFar and away, the most popular website, when it comes to storing ‘in the cloud’ bookmarks, is Delicious. It became so popular so quickly, that Yahoo picked them up in December of 2005 for somewhere between $15 million and $30 million.

For those of you who don’t know what Delicious is, it is simply a one stop shop, for storing your bookmarks in one quick and easy location.

Of course with success comes competition, with sites such as Diigy or Simpy and you could possibly even consider Digg or Reddit as well. However sometimes you find your own opinion matters the most, and you’d like to create your own Del.icio.us-like private bookmarking service for your family, friends or maybe even your workplace. That’s where with some prerequisites from your web host, and a little MYSQL knowledge, you can create your own social bookmarking site, with Scuttle.

Scuttle is simply defined as a “Web-based social bookmarking system. It allows multiple users to store, share and tag their favorite links online.” It is an open-source del.icio.us alternative that requires only PHP and a MYSQL database from your web host. After installation, you’ll have a very similar look to what Delicious offers.

scuttle - del.icio.us script

Similar to Delicious, the Scuttle system offers tagging with keyword relations, a tag cloud and advanced searching for your own bookmarks, or the entire site.

delicious script

Just like Delicious, you also have advanced security for protection on your bookmarks. You have the ability to make certain marks publicly available, or just private. There is also RSS options, MP3 playback and for Firefox users, even the ability to add marks via a very similar Delicious like Firefox extension.

del.icio.us script

Being open source, Scuttle’s options are endless. You can customize the product at will and possibly even bring yet another competitor to the strong social bookmarking arena. It’s hard not to like what you get with Scuttle’s options, and the price. I haven’t played with it enough to find any flaws or bugs, but with a little basic knowledge of setting up a MYSQL database, PHP hosting and lots of web surfing to add a plethora of bookmarks, you may be able to come up with some. Whatever the case, you should find your expectations extremely fulfilled with Scuttle.

What are your thoughts? How would you utilize something like Scuttle? What advantages do you see over many of the other bookmarking sites? Do you know of any similar products?

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T.J. Mininday

Hi, my name T.J. and I'm a Techaholic. Since the takeoff of Web 2.0, I have been 'over the top' obsessed with technology, the internet, and just about every single gadget released during that time. Whether reading, watching or listening, I can't get enough. Although the past few years have fueled my obsession, I've loved computers, gaming and all forms of technology since my early teen years(The Early 90s). It took an incredible amount of begging and prodding to push my Dad into purchasing my first $3000 Pentium Pro PC. I was immediately hooked, and I later went on to get a degree in Computer Networking and have been involved in the field ever since. I currently am employed as an IT Field Engineer, and blog part time on TheWindowsFix.com and ConnectedInternet.com. You'll find that I write about many of the same topics as MUO and look forward to contributing to this fantastic blog, for years to come.

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  • http://mekk.waw.pl Mekk

    Scuttle is reasonably popular as black SEO method (= a way to create fake link-rich sites). Once Google recognizes it, it may need some extra care to avoid problems…

    • http://www.thewindowsfix.com T.J. Mininday

      Huh, had no idea. Does Delicious have much relevance in Google anyway? I rarely see a Delicious link during a search.

  • Benjamin HKB

    Hi, Scuttle is quite rarely updated because of the main developper overload. That is why we started a fork project called SemanticScuttle. This new project is particularly adapted for social bookmarking into small communities. It offers new features like : structured tags allowing inclusion between tags, tags’ descriptions (personal or common in a kind of wiki space), antispam question when registering and so on.

    If you are interested, look the project page.

    About the black SEO method, I would just say that Scuttle (and SemanticScuttle) implements the no-follow attribute on links by default.