Is the del.icio.us HTML tool broken?

This entry was published at least two years ago (originally posted on June 16, 2006). Since that time the information may have become outdated or my beliefs may have changed (in general, assume a more open and liberal current viewpoint). A fuller disclaimer is available.

I’ve been noticing some weirdness with my ‘Eclinkticism’ sidebar, and it appears that the HTML service provided by del.icio.us at del.icio.us/html/username may be having some issues. Anyone out there seeing this too? (Details under the cut…)

I toss things into my del.icio.us account pretty frequently. To create the ‘eclinkticism’ sidebar, I have a custom script set up that pulls the most recent additions via the HTML feeds option once an hour and writes that to a text file, which is then inserted into the HTML on every page load as an SSI include.

The shell script I’m using to call the HTML feed is as follows (though ‘cu rl’ in line 5 should be a single word rather than ‘cu rl’, it was triggering a 403 Forbidden error preventing the post before I split it up…and it still is…can I not type ‘cu rl’ as a single word?’):

#!/bin/bash
tmpfile="/home/-username-/delicious.tmp"
incfile="/home/-username-/public_html/delicious.inc"
URL="http://del.icio.us/html/djwudi"

cu rl -s -f -d rssbutton=no -d tags=no -d extended=body $URL -o $tmpfile

if [ -s $tmpfile ]; then
    mv -f $tmpfile $incfile
    echo "del.icio.us linklog sucessfully updated!"
    exit 0
fi

echo "something went all fubar like"
exit 1

Until recently, all was working fine. However, over the past few days, my sidebar hasn’t seemed to be updating correctly. Most of the time, the most recent link displayed is ‘First Pic of Wii Debug Unit?’, which I saved over a week ago, on June 7th. Occasionally, the sidebar will display ‘Quinn (Tetris for Mac OS X)’, from just a few days ago on June 12th, but then it will revert to the June 7th link.

At first I thought it was something on my end, but after checking my script, the cron job, and watching the generated include file to verify that it was being rebuilt each hour, I couldn’t find anything wrong. So, I started plugging HTML feed URLs into del.icio.us by hand.

del.icio.us/djwudi: Displays all my links, up to the most current links, as expected.
del.icio.us/html/djwudi: Alternates between displaying the two above-described options (stopping at either ‘First pic…’ or ‘Quinn…’). At first ends with ‘First pic…’, reloading produces ‘Quinn…’, reloading more times sometimes switches which result is returned, other times the same result is returned again.
Adding arguments to the request URL (del.icio.us/html/djwudi?rssbutton=no, del.icio.us/html/djwudi?tags=no, del.icio.us/html/djwudi?extended=body or combinations thereof) alter the output as expected, but still persist in alternating between stopping at either ‘First pic…’ or ‘Quinn…’.

Is anyone else seeing these same issues? Might anyone know whether it is del.icio.us as it appears, or whether it’s an issue with my script that I’ve missed, or possibly something in between (a server cache somewhere between my webserver and del.icio.us)?

I suppose I could switch over to the Javascript feed option…but I like the fact that I was able to figure out and implement the HTML feed (mostly) on my own (with some small tweaks thanks to John Hoke), I like the way it works (when it works), and I’m just stubborn enough that I’d prefer not to move to something else if I don’t have to.

Update: I tried the Javascript feed, and not only would it take some CSS tweaking to get it to format right, but it still wasn’t grabbing the latest links. It was behaving exactly as the HTML feed option is. Meh.

“Keep It Gay” by Brooks, Mel from the album The Producers (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (2005, 5:51).