Scuttle: Your Own Server-Side Bookmarks the del.icio.us’ Way

I have been using del.​icio.​us since I first heard about it (by read­ing an an­nounce­ment of its ac­quire­ment by Yahoo!) and I have to con­fess I was taken by the ap­proach. The only thing I didn’t like was the fact that I didn’t have my book­marks and the ser­vice under con­trol.

Thanks to a note by Erik I found out about Scut­tle, an open source clone of del.​icio.​us which every­one can host on his/her own server. (Please note: scut­tle.org only of­fers their pub­lic book­mark­ing ser­vice, the soft­ware can only be lo­cated at their Source­Forge page.) Scut­tle is writ­ten in PHP and re­quires MySQL as data­base back­end.

Scut­tle of­fers most of the fea­tures of del.​icio.​us and can even im­port your book­marks from there. Some minor us­abil­ity-is­sues still arise, but I can live with them. Their API is com­pat­i­ble to del.​icio.​us so most ex­ter­nal del.​icio.​us ap­pli­ca­tions will work with Scut­tle, as long as the tools allow you to spec­ify the URL of the ser­vice. Ad­di­tion­ally, Scut­tle pro­vides three lev­els of vis­i­bil­ity for your book­marks: pub­lic book­marks, shared with your watch­list (= your friends/col­leagues), and pri­vate book­marks.

I in­stalled Scut­tle at my com­pany and every­one is busy using it and is happy to now hav­ing a cen­tral place to store their book­marks. Del.​icio.​us was no op­tion for us be­cause all book­marks are pub­lic there.

I can strongly rec­om­mend using this soft­ware to every­one who wants to have a cen­tral­ized way for stor­ing their book­marks with­out giv­ing away all con­trols over their book­marks.

News­Forge has pub­lished a nice re­view of the soft­ware.