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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!
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