Manufactura Independente
Both of us were early users of the del.icio.us service, having used it during our college days and beyond to make sense of our web pathways.
Around 2016, the then owner of the del.icio.us domain started injecting ads in the feeds of the long gone users of the service. This triggered a discussion with Julien Deswaef about reviving the old Delicious look on top of Shaarli, a free/open source web platform focused on publishing bookmarks.
From there, we worked with Julien to develop a theme for Shaarli based on the early 2004 del.icio.us layout -- thankfully preserved in screenshots by its author, Joshua Schachter.
This effort goes beyond a nostalgic drive to revive an old web artifact. We built this theme in order to use it to build our link collections, as we still see a point to this style's simplicity, especially when faced with today's focus on inexpressive, rounded-corner, streamlined web interfaces.
We cherish the blue links, the default browser font, the lowercase continuous tag lists and the soft grey metadata. Even the clumsy tag clouds are worth revisiting: they've never been that useful as a way to visualise a collection of tags -- too much focus on the most used tags, and their spatial placement is mostly random --, but they do give out a tentative map of what to look into.
The possibility to bring back the old Del.icio.us look into an actually functioning bookmark management platform is only possible thanks to the free and open nature of Shaarli. We're also thankful that it is such a solid tool for the job of handling bookmarks, along with its understandable architecture that makes it easy (and even pleasurable) to extend.
