Del.icio.us fun with automated links
I have been publishing a lot of links to del.icio.us recently and I wanted to post them here too as an entry for a day. For me, my del.icio.us links provide a very accurate representation of things I am excited about or interested in.
Rather than re-invent the wheel, I decided to investigate Wordpress plugins, many of which are listed on the Wordpress site. I wasn’t interested in ones that displayed the links in the sidebar or ones which post on a link by link basis. My favourite was the Perl script that runs on a daily basis as a crontab, it produces the right output but unfortunately the link to download the latest version was a 404.
Around about the same time I discovered, thanks to Si, that del.icio.us itself offered the same service. This little known (and experimental) feature can be found in your de.icio.us settings: https://secure.del.icio.us/settings/usernamehere/blogging/posting?add. This works absolutely as intended it, displaying the links to my tags on del.icio.us as well as the description, posted every night between 1 and 2.
This experimental feature can automatically post entries to your blog every day containing your latest del.icio.us links. It supports Movable Type, Typepad, Wordpress, and other kinds of blog software.
The only problem with this is that the form to enter the details is utterly atrocious!
When you first go to the page all that it tells you is the names of the tables it is inserting your data in (job_name, out_name, out_pass, out_url, out_time, out_blog_id, out_cat_id, controls), an explanation to the purpose and a summarised list of what to enter in each field. To enter in a new ‘job’ you have to click “add a new thingy”, cute but not particularly informative.
The form as pictured above, has labels which reflect the obscurely named rows and the clarity of the explanations below leaves a little to be desired.
- job_name is the name for your posting “thingy”, which can be anything
- out_name is the login name you use for your blog
- out_pass is the password you use for your blog
- out_url is the full URL of the XML-RPC interface for your blog, which probably ends in something like mt-xmlrpc.cgi
- out_time is the hour (from 0-23 in GMT) to post your links at every day
- out_blog_id is your blog ID number (which is probably 1 if you have only one blog)
- out_cat_id is optional: the category ID number in your blog where you’d like to put these posts
Each ‘thingy’ relates effectively to a crontab job, you need to know details about your blog before you start to fill this out.
- job_name the name for your crontab job, something meaningful like ‘personal’ or ‘work blog’ might be wise, or just a number like I used.
- out_name is the login name you use for the blog you want to post to.
- out_pass is the password you use for the blog you want to post to.
- out_url is the full URL of the XML-RPC interface for your blog, which probably ends in something like mt-xmlrpc.cgi - If you are using Wordpress, you might be able to view source to get this which may look something like ‘
<link rel="EditURI" type="application/rsd+xml" title="RSD" href="http://notes.natbat.net/xmlrpc.php?rsd" />‘ just use the href value without the ‘?rsd’ though, e.g.http://notes.natbat.net/xmlrpc.php. - out_time is the hour (from 0-23 in GMT) to post your links at every day. This isn’t the actual time it will post the links, it will choose a random minute past the hour to spread load.
- out_blog_id is your blog ID number (which is probably 1 if you have only one blog) - I left this as 1.
- out_cat_id is optional: the category ID number in your blog where you’d like to put these posts. If you are using Wordpress you can go to Manage > Categories and there you will find a list of your categories and their corresponding ID’s, it is this ID you use here as the default category to post to.
I hope this saves you some of the hair tearing I went through!
Merry Christmas everyone!
Thanks for posting this. I set it up a long time ago but it didn’t work for me and put off figuring out what was wrong until later. So today, seeing that it was working for you I decided to look into the problem and it turned out that the account that I had specified didn’t have permission to post to the site but there was no indication that it wasn’t working apart from the posts not showing up. Once I fixed that, the links started to be posted correctly.
Stuart Woodward - December 30th, 2006 at 1:31 pm[…] Natalie Downe » Blog Archive » Del.icio.us fun with automated links (tags: blogging tagging) […]
links for 2007-01-09 » Ross’ PhD Blog - January 9th, 2007 at 12:48 am[…] Natalie Downe » Blog Archive » Del.icio.us fun with automated links (tags: del.icio.us delicious blogging blog wordpress) […]
Reflective Perspective » links for 2007-01-11 - January 11th, 2007 at 9:13 pmhi
you may (or may not) be interested to know that the bookmarking service Diigo (http://www.diigo.com/help/what_is_new), has a daily posting tool too, and it is a little easier to use.
I use Diigo rather that del.icio.us now because it allows you to copy text and images from a site and annotate these. All this gets shown in your daily posting post. You can also automatically send the bookmark to del.icio.us too.
Its rather good
phil - January 15th, 2007 at 8:40 pmThanks for the informative post!
Since del.icio.us has offered their service, I have discontinued active development of my script (which should now be available — Dreamhost wanted my source files to execute even though I explicitly named them without a script file extension and disabled CGI execution in that directory — go figure). I continue to respond to any bug reports, though.
I plan on updating my script page with a link to this post so that others may learn about the service that del.icio.us provides and be able to choose which method they prefer best.
Stephen - January 18th, 2007 at 2:14 am[…] Note: It has come to my attention that del.icio.us now offers a service that does pretty much the same thing as my script, automatically. Natalie Downe has posted instructions on her blog for how to get the service to work with Wordpress blogs. If you want more control over your posts, though, I still recommend my script (ok, and maybe I’m a bit biased Features: […]
Trapped at Berkeley » Blog Archive » Daily del.icio.us Links Script for Wordpress - The Rants of a UC Berkeley Student - January 18th, 2007 at 2:18 am[…] Del.icio.us fun with automated links (tags: blog tagging wordpress del.icio.us) […]
Jon Swerens, folk piano » Blog Archive » links for 2007-02-17 - February 17th, 2007 at 8:20 pm[…] Del.icio.us fun with automated links [Natalie Downe] Creating daily del.icio.us bookmark post in Wordpress. (tags: del.icio.us blog wordpress tutorial ponderlinks) […]
links for 2007-03-04 : Tama Leaver dot Net - March 4th, 2007 at 7:23 am[…] Natalie Downe » Blog Archive » Del.icio.us fun with automated links I have been publishing a lot of links to del.icio.us recently and I wanted to post them here too as an entry for a day. For me, my del.icio.us links provide a very accurate representation of things I am excited about or interested in. (tags: del.icio.us delicious wordpress blog tutorial howto learn) Posted by delicious on Mar 12 2007 under delicious | digg it | save it […]
links for 2007-03-12 :: ultramookie - March 12th, 2007 at 7:23 am[…] Natalie Downe » Blog Archive » Del.icio.us fun with automated links (tags: del.icio.us wordpress tutorial howto blog) […]
We Blog… » Blog Archive » links for 2007-03-22 - March 22nd, 2007 at 10:20 am[…] de.licio.us also has a function that will auto post bookmarked links to a blog. After a bit of searching and ran across an explanation of it on Natalie Downe’s blog (via this post on Trapped at Berkeley). […]
De.lico.us Links - from Creating a Better Life - April 16th, 2007 at 11:21 pm[…] Natalie Downe » Blog Archive » Del.icio.us fun with automated links (tags: del.icio.us wordpress tutorial) […]
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