As I’ve been more and more interested in using tag-based taxonomies to categorize and track things, I’ve been looking more and more often at using del.icio.us as a bookmark manager and potential replacement for my linklog.
Admittedly, when I first looked at del.icio.us a while back, I didn’t really understand what the deal was, or why it was so special. After spending time bouncing around Flickr and finding all sorts of interesting photographic work by exploring the tags people had used to categorize their photos, though, it finally clicked — del.icio.us was using the same concept to classify virtually the entire web. Oh! Now I get it!
So the old linklog has been removed from my sidebar (though the archives still exist), and has been replaced with a list of the most recent fifteen items added to my del.icio.us page. There’s an RSS feed available too, though as I’ll be using FeedBurner‘s link splicing ability to add my del.icio.us links to my main RSS feeds (just as I do for my Flickr photos), subscribing to that is definitely optional.
It may be a day or so before the links get spliced in, though — for some reason, FeedBurner keeps telling me that ‘djwudi’ isn’t a valid del.icio.us ID. Funny, del.icio.us thinks it is…I’m going to have to work on that.
Update: FeedBurner tracked down the issue they were having with connecting to del.icio.us, and I’ve updated my feeds. Both the ‘full posts’ and ‘full posts with comments’ feeds have the links spliced in, and the The ‘eclinkticism’ feed has been switched over to my del.icio.us links (if you were subscribed to either of my full post feeds and the linklog feed, you’ll be able to delete the linklog feed now). The ‘excerpts only’ feed has been left as-is (it doesn’t include my flickr photos, either).
Update 2: Well, it seemed like a good idea. However, that was a bit too much all in one feed. Links have been taken back out of the full-post and full-post-with-comments feeds, in favor of leaving them in their own separate feed. I’m also wondering if I should pull my Flickr photos out of the main streams, in favor of making everything mix-and-match. Seems better to let people pick and choose what they want to pay attention to rather than forcing everything on them all at once….
The part I’m happiest about was figuring out a very easy way to integrate my del.icio.us links into my site without having to deal with extra Movable Type plugins, installing extra software, or the like. del.icio.us provides an HTML feed of recent links, so I just set up a simple shell script, then use cron to run it every hour on the hour. Here’s the script in question:
#!/bin/sh
curl -s -f -d rssbutton=no -d tags=no -d extended=body http://del.icio.us/html/djwudi -o /Library/WebServer/Documents/eclecticism/delicious.tmp
mv -f /Library/WebServer/Documents/eclecticism/delicious.tmp /Library/WebServer/Documents/eclecticism/delicious.inc
echo “del.icio.us linklog sucessfully updated!”
The curl command retrieves the HTML feed of my links and saves it to a file, which mv then renames (this ensures that there won’t be an issue if the file is being updated at the same time that my webserver is expecting to be able to read from it), and echo returns a short message letting me know that the operation concluded successfully (cron e-mails me the confirmation message each time it runs…and I may turn that off soon now that I know everything’s working). Then, anytime someone loads my site, a simple PHP include loads the delicious.inc file into the page. Quick and simple.
Oh, and the name of the shell script?
deli.sh
“867-5309 Jenny (Hot Tracks)” by Tutone, Tommy from the album Edge, The Level 2 (1995, 5:31).