Today’s update is brought to you by an anonymous tipster who sent in a few new tools to put into my repository. Thank you, elusive friend!
In a Nutshell
Shaarli is a social bookmarking service, allowing you to host and share your bookmarks with your friends. It’s easy to set up and basically feature complete. It’s open-source and free of charge.
Installation: [rating=5]
Price: [rating=5]
What does it do?
This post takes us back to the days of delicious and its numerous clones. You do remember delicious, right? If not, let me tell you a little bit about it: It started out as a small tool developed by a student who wanted to be able to share with others the sites he found all over the web. It was easy to use and was a harbinger of the push into social that was to follow in the years to comes. Eventually sold to Yahoo! for a hefty sum, it made this student rather rich but also disillusioned about what happens to a service once it’s been sold off to a big player.
While delicious and its users were gobbled up, Yahoo! apparently had no idea what to do with it. Through the years it withered while competitors thrived until at some point it finally saw a complete overhaul. By then, unfortunately, not only users, but the whole social bookmarking train had moved on, replaced by the likes of Digg, Reddit and ultimately Twitter.
Still, there are people who like the concept, and for those Shaarli is a rather feature complete and easy to use self-hosted alternative. It has all the bells and whistles (including tag clouds, image previews and even a rather interesting digest view) you could ever want.
Installation
Installation is really straightforward. Download their ZIP file, extract the contents into a folder on your webspace and you’re good to go. Shaarli doesn’t even need a database, which is always a plus for people with cheap webspace.