In trying to expand and solidify my facility with Ruby and related things, as well as scratching my own itch, I’ve started a new project: Savorous.

Why Make It

The problem it’s meant to solve is filling in the missing data in feeds that only deliver bare links without the associated summary or meta-data. It’s made specifically with Delicious feeds in mind, but it could be any feed that is basically just a list of links.

Because the links lack that information, I’m compelled to open each of them with even the tiniest possibility of appreciable content behind it, which can be (and often is) a big waste of time.

Where To Go

The site is ready to go in only the thinnest proof-of-concept sense, and you’re welcome to try it out at Savorous.info.

Internals

While my intent is to both cache the fill-in data and to assertively crawl for it, which is a huge undertaking and not something I could tackle up-front, currently everything is done on the fly and no data is stored. This means it’s slow. It hopefully won’t matter much because you won’t be hitting the service on-demand anyway, you’ll be seeing the results of your feed reader’s visits to the service.

How To Use Savorous

Savorous is as simple as I could make it (and no simpler). You can use the form on the front page to generate the URL for your Savorous feed, or simply append your feed URL to “http://savorous.info/?url=” without waiting for the form and its machinery to do their thing.

Subscribe to the resulting URL, and see how it works out for you. I welcome any and all feedback at the email shown here.