unalog project

unalog is what the kids call a social bookmarking toolkit. It's free software with an MIT-style license and its present form has been developed in fits and starts since fall 2003, when a group of attendees at the Access 2003 conference in Edmonton worked out a hackfest project to track and share OpenURLs visited by user and group. We'd not yet heard of del.icio.us or furl.net yet because neither had been publicly announced yet. Silly librarians, we.

It's written in Python [1], uses Quixote [2] and its PTL templating language as a web framework, and the ZODB [3] as a backing store. It also uses PyLucene [4] for indexing and searching of page and bookmark content.

unalog has an intermittently active all-purpose mailing list [5] all are welcome to join. Its development is tracked using trac [6] running at the YCMI [7], my current employer. I was briefly paid to work on unalog for Yale University; it resulted in a number of features being added to the codebase and the unalog instance for the Yale campus at links.med.yale.edu, which ran from fall 2004 through early 2007.

The more heavily used unalog in the wild is unalog.com [8], which tracks the attention of a swath of hacker/librarians who tend to hang out on #code4lib and a variety of folks with other talents and largely similar interests. This makes for fascinating reading, and, frankly, makes it the single information source I could not imagine living without.

Because of this I support unalog.com out of my own pocket. If I were a librarian in the 1970s I would be spending my time and energy pulling articles, books, and jazz LPs aside for the readers whose interests I knew well, much like some amazing public service librarians did for me at the Nora Branch Library [9] when I was young, because that's what our profession has always done. Instead I run unalog.com. [In 2006, patron tells *you* what to read. What a century.]

It costs me roughly $50/mo to run the site. Like I said, I don't know what I'd do without it, so I intend to keep it running it indefinitely. If you like unalog.com and wish to support it please consider donating $20 to make it cheaper on me this month by clicking the paypal button up at the top of the right-hand column. Thanks!