Ian owes me a pint

(update: Gavin Bell at Nature gave up one of his app spots so that I could put this live, which I did: only to discover that Google App Engine is even more unforgiving of timeouts than Facebook. Currently trying to work out how to make the bookmarking process, for now it doesn't work very well. Also the search is broken, though that's Google's fault and not mine.)

I bet Ian earlier that I could rewrite Connotea on App Engine in six hours. I can't remember why. Probably ego (mine, I mean). He didn't actually bet me a pint but he should have done...

... because the original estimate was a tad optimistic (ahem). After twelve hours I've produced pycite, though, which is pretty good going I think. I'll admit it: Python is actually very cool.

pycite is three hundred lines of logic and a set of html templates that implements a (very simple) social bookmarking service. Sadly I don't actually have an App Engine account so it's not live on the web anywhere (I'll buy whoever does have an account and puts it up first a pint - let's spread the love), you'll have to download it and run it locally to see it in action.

What you can do with it:

• run it without owning a server of your own
• log in with your Google account
• add new bookmarks (the citation will be collected automagically)
• view everybody's bookmarks
• filter bookmarks by user:

  http://path.to.pycite/users/bob.smith

• and by tag:

  http://path.to.pycite/tags/diabetes

• and by user and tag:

  http://path.to.pycite/users/bob.smith/tags/diabetes

• and by keyword (the full text of each bookmarked page is searchable):

  http://path.to.pycite/users/bob.smith?q=t2d

• get atom feeds for all of the above

What you can't do with it (yet):

• edit or delete bookmarks
• anything else

I've put it all up on Google Code. It's fairly straightforward stuff so if you've got any brilliant social bookmarking ideas then go for it. Send me an email and I'll give you write access to the subversion repository.