Posting del.icio.us Links Weekly to WordPress

I’ve been using del.icio.us to share links since 2005. I’ve always used another method for bookmarking links for myself, but del.icio.us has been my favorite method for the sharing of interesting links. Before del.icio.us I had a separate linkblog so right away I wanted a way to display my shared links in a similar format. I started out by replacing my linkblog with an html rendering of the RSS feed from del.icio.us. I quickly realized that I wanted more than that so I set the blog back up and used a cron job to auto-post my links to the WP database. I’ve written about all of this before.

After a while, I gave up on the linkblog completely and just used a widget to show the links on my blog. Not quite what I wanted but good enough for a while. Recently I decided to set up the daily blog posting feature that del.icio.us provides. This is a very nice feature but doesn’t work well for me because my links come in waves. So, I turned that off earlier this week and set off in search of a way to post the links as a weekly roundup. I’ve seen other sites do this and I like it a lot.

After a few quick searches, I didn’t find anything I thought was worth spending time fooling with. It seems to me it’s just as easy to come up with something on my own. As a hacker I would prefer something as automatic as possible, but I don’t mind having to do something manually. I will probably want to tweak the weekly posting a touch anyway.

The first thing that came to mind was using the RSS feed but I dismissed that because it will only show a maximum of 100 items. That would probably do for my purposes but I’d like to go ahead and set up something I don’t have to worry about – did I get all the links? etc.

So I decided on a different approach. I haven’t done any of this yet. I am going to work on it while I write this.

Here is the plan:

  1. export the links as html
  2. grab out the html I need and paste it into a new post in WP
  3. post it

Simple, except for a few points.

I actually came up with this idea a few days ago and I grabbed an export then. I checked my blog and found that the latest link posted was the trash vortex page at greenpeace.org so I simply removed all links above that and saved this file as ~/delicious.html.

Remove all html above the last posted link

Now it’s time to grab the new links for this week, so I go to del.icio.us and export the html and save it to the desktop. Then,

mv ~/delicious.htm ~/delicious-old.htm
mv ~/Desktop/del*.htm ~/delicious.htm
diff ~/del* > links.diff

The only thing to do now is clean it up and post it. Let’s start by doing it manually. I’ve stripped most of the new links out for demonstration. Take a look.

Diff file

First, I remove the first three lines and the last five lines. I’ve run a few tests now and it looks as though this will always be the case. This should make automation easier. This procedure is obviously going to require a bit of manual intervention so I should be able to notice when a problem crops up.

After removing those lines I am left with a bunch of lines like those below. 

> <DL><p><DT><A HREF="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123731266862258869.html" LAST_VISIT="1238172267" ADD_DATE="1238172267" TAGS="fun,economics,games,culture,scrabble,words">Scrabble and Other Games Have Overvalued Points - WSJ.com</A>
> <DD>Scrabble is a great game and should be left alone.

The only thing necessary to make this “work” is to remove the > at the beginning of each line, but we will make it “right” by changing uppercase tags and attributes to lowercase, closing all elements, and wrapping all of it in 

<dl></dl>

Then I copy and paste it into a new post in WP and I’m all set. Requires a bit of input but not hard to do. I will see how much I can automate i on Wednesday.

This is the first in a series of posts. The next post is here

March 30, 2009 | Filed Under Work 

Comments

Leave a Reply




Experience