Two Cents and a Thousand Words Maine, photography, technology, politics, and other selected ramblings

Short yet illus.trio.us

gre.gario.us has ended its short run as a publicly-accessible Web service. It simply became too popular for its own good; the creator/operator of del.icio.us shut off access from gre.gario.us because it was taking up too much bandwidth.

I had a few things in mind as I created the site. Above all I didn’t think it would really catch on (at least as quickly as it did). I thought I’d get a few early adopters looking at it, and presumed I might get a little jump a couple weeks down the road with a blog mention or something. I also knew that the service basically worked around some limitations of del.icio.us’s RSS structure; it essentially meant that I used a straight system of fetching HTML pages. I don’t deny that it took a lot of bandwidth; the size of the URL page cache directory that I had was somewhere around 200 MB each day for the couple of days I had it up. I tried to make the service as courteous as possible (building in delays, caching, and the like), but unfortunately del.icio.us’s structure wasn’t helping. I knew I might have to stop the service if it did, by some stretch of the imagination, become popular.

Quite simply, it did. Here are a few quick stats:

• 2200+ del.icio.us usernames run through the service
• 275 links from del.icio.us users (13 of which tagged the service as cool and 3 of which had the audacity to call either myself or the site geek)
• Some links from blogs and sites
• A few e-mails with praise and suggestions

Per the suggestion of Jon Ippolito, one of my new media professors, I’ve kept a cached page of my own results to demonstrate as an example of the service in my portfolio. gre.gario.us is by far my most successful site yet, so I definitely want to mention it with my other past works.

gre.gario.us provided a wonderful start to my Semsym collection of sites. My next top priority is to develop the site for Semsym; from there I really have way too many ideas to count. I have a few that would be pretty simple to do; I’d like to branch off from del.icio.us again, but in a nicer way.

I’ve always believed that anything is possible with the Web if you put enough time, effort, and creativity into it. The downside is that sometimes you use a system in a way that it wasn’t designed to be used, and it might not always work out. That’s fine; I’m really happy with gre.gario.us’s (72 hours of) success, and I think I was able to show a lot of people another application of del.icio.us’s simple yet powerful service. Hopefully in time my functionality will become incorporated into the service itself.

(And I promise that’s it with the .us jokes… for now. Other strange domains may follow.)