After doing some research, I quickly found out that this seems to be a “bug” (well the devs say it isn’t but one can argue…) of MySQL, caused by an optimization of a SELECT DISTINCT queries.

So I patched services/bookmarkservice.php and removed the DISTINCT keyword in the SQL-query of getBookmarks() (line 249, version 0.7.2).

Up to now, I did not experience any duplicate lines caused by this. I think, I’m going to report this minor issue upstream.

Update: hmm, ups, when searching, you will most certainly get duplicate results… I’ll check in the evening.

Update 2: Ok, so I wrote a litte more extensive patch, by wrapping the original SELECT DISTINCT statement as a subselect and ordering the result as such. This now really works. The patch for 0.7.2 can be downloaded here. You have to apply it to services/bookmarkservice.php.

Update 3: Ok, I somehow managed to delete the patch file. I am sorry. I will look if I can find it in any of the old backups, but I am not too convinced about this.

Thanks to a note by Erik I found out about Scuttle, an open source clone of del.icio.us which everyone can host on his/her own server. (Please note: scuttle.org only offers their public bookmarking service, the software can only be located at their SourceForge page.) Scuttle is written in PHP and requires MySQL as database backend.

Scuttle offers most of the features of del.icio.us and can even import your bookmarks from there. Some minor usability-issues still arise, but I can live with them. Their API is compatible to del.icio.us so most external del.icio.us applications will work with Scuttle, as long as the tools allow you to specify the URL of the service. Additionally, Scuttle provides three levels of visibility for your bookmarks: public bookmarks, shared with your watchlist (= your friends/colleagues), and private bookmarks.

I installed Scuttle at my company and everyone is busy using it and is happy to now having a central place to store their bookmarks. Del.icio.us was no option for us because all bookmarks are public there.

I can strongly recommend using this software to everyone who wants to have a centralized way for storing their bookmarks without giving away all controls over their bookmarks.

NewsForge has published a nice review of the software.