More on the weirdness that is del.icio.us API
- Magnus Therning
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.