Today I updated my Scuttle install to release 0.7.1. Scuttle is a personal bookmark manager similar to del.icio.us. The new stylesheet is much better than the old one but still takes lot of space (bad info/space ratio). My old styleshet unfortunately no longer works so I have to tweak again - will do so in the next days.

Today's blog entry is on another scuttle modifcation: loading it in the Firefox sidebar. Most of the actual work was done by Frank - I just tweaked his hacks a little bit and are now sharing our simple solution.

To be able to use Scuttle in the sidebar we need a special Stylesheet which will adjust the output to the small space available (we use a width of 230 pixel). We also need to adjust the Scuttle sources to load this stylesheet under certain conditions and make sure all links open in the correct window.

Here is the step by step guide:

1. Apply the scuttle-target-self.patch - this adds a target=“self” attribute to all links which should not open in the main window but stay in the sidebar.
2. Put the sidebar.css into your scuttle directory
3. Apply the scuttle-sidebarcss-hack.patch which will always load the sidebar.css if /sidebar/ is in the URL
4. Create a symlink in the scuttle dir named sidebar linking to the scuttle dir itself: $> ln -s . sidebar

Now the sidebar-optimized Scuttle is available through a sidebar pseudo subdir eg: http://tools.splitbrain.org/scuttle/sidebar/

Just bookmark this location in your bookmark toolbar, right click on the bookmark, choose Properties and check Open Link in Sidebar.

Of course there is much room for improvement. The symlink and match on the URL are just hacks. Ideally Scuttle would either come with a special sidebar.php or allow specifying the used CSS in a parameter. Maybe they'll add in in a next release. The sidebar CSS isn't complete yet as well - eg. the add bookmark screen isn't optimized yet. I'll probably release a tweaked sidebar.css after I finished the main one.

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• Scuttle
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