intertwingly

A few weeks back I wrote a simple personal application for sharing bookmarks with my wife.  Think of it as a decentralized del.icio.us / twitter combination that uses XMPP instead of SMS.  We’ve found it quite useful.  Perhaps others who are predisposed to host their own OpenID and personal IM server may too.

It is a single page application, executable as CGI, using a style of programming I often use with PHP.  But this particular application happens to be in Ruby.  It depends on Builder, HTML5, and XMPP4R.  It also makes use of a monkey patch that I developed two weeks ago.

If you have the necessary prerequisites installed, simply:

• drop these files into a directory in your Apache root
• create a data dir in that directory that is writable by the apache process
• modify the user id and password information you see in star.rb
• make the star.rb executable (often that means renaming it to index.cgi and chmod +x the resulting file).

I then access the application through a bookmarklet:

javascript:location.href='http://rubix/bookmark/?uri='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+'&title='+encodeURIComponent(document.title)+'&user=rubys'

Adjust the href and user values to taste.

One feature I particularly like about this implementation is the way that ejabberd will queue up notifications if the recipient is offline