Blog entries tagged with "del.icio.us"

I have just finished sorting through the 400 odd links that I had bookmarked on Delicious, but for some reason had not tagged.

It was interesting looking back at articles and other pages that I had deemed it worthwhile to bookmark. About half my time was spend re-reading these, and not just to determine the appropriate tags.

However, one frustrating thing was that around half of them were for pages that no longer exist. This is a real shame as it has only been three years since I started using Delicious. I wonder how many of my other bookmarked links are still valid. I hope it is a lot more than 50%.

Now I need to properly tag the bookmarks that are just tagged with to-read. Reading them at the same time of course.

I also need to finish tagging many of these posts. Some of which are not tagged and others not very well.

For a while now I have integrated del.icio.us with my site via the RSS feeds. This was a workable solution except that there were two issues:

• First it was dependant on fetching the RSS feeds from del.icio.us during a page load. This didn’t always work, as shown by the outage last week;
• Second it only enabled me to automatically include links at the leafs of the tree that is my computer collection as the RSS feed for a manufacturer page (eg computers+apple) also included all the item specific links (eg computers+apple+powermac+6400).

So what did I do? I pretty much copied the code from PHP Parsing Del.icio.us except that I grab all my links and load them into the database instead of writing them to a text file. Then I modified my display code to take into account any sub-branches and exclude them.

The main benefit is that each page load is only dependant on the local database and I am also no longer constrained by the thirty link limit of the RSS feeds.

I still need to wean my links page away from the RSS feeds as well…

I have to say that the combination of live bookmarks in Firefox and rss feeds from del.icio.us is highly addictive. I probably check the recently posted sites at least a couple of times a day and that is how I came across Search for a Super Parma, a site that has ratings for chicken parma’s (aka chicken parmigiana) available in Melbourne and Greater Victoria.

What is dissapointing is that they don’t have a rating for the chicken parma available from the Hotel Bedford. The relevance of this is that after Melbourne Perl Mongers (the next one is this week) we go around the corner to the Bedford where for the past few months the Wednesday night special has been the chicken parma…

Thanks to Magpie RSS I have been able to integrate del.icio.us directly into this site.

The first place was for the ‘Other resources’ section at the bottom of the pages for the items in my computer collection. Once I saw a parallel between the directory structure I use and possible tags it was a trivial matter to retrieve the corresponding links. So far I have only done a couple of pages, one of which being the PowerMac 9600, with very few links. The advantage of this will become much more evident as I continue sorting through my bookmarks and posting them to del.icio.us.

The second place was to replace my links section with the links for a selected number of tags.

Now I need to remember to add descriptions to links as I post them and also go back through the links I have already posted. Doing this will bring a higher level of content to my site. And since content is king it is unlikely to be negative…

My ‘current’ procedure for bookmarking interesting sites is to simply drag the url onto the desktop. Then every few months I sort through all these links and if any of them are still interesting I move it into the directory that is then use to generate my links pages. This process has a number of drawback with the major one being that if I am not on my main box at home I have to do something different such as sending any interesting urls to myself in an email.

A few weeks ago I came across del.icio.us which is a social bookmark manager that “allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only between your own browsers and machines, but also with others”.

So what I did earlier this afternoon was to create an account on to which I then added a number of bookmarks to based on what was currently on my desktop (and others that I know off by heart). The results of this effort can be seen if you are so inclined. If this works out I will likely rewrite the links page on this site to pull my bookmarks directly from del.icio.us. I may even go as far as copying what Jon Udell has done and have all of these blog entries (and maybe the items in my computer collection) automatically inserted as well. Or is that going a bit too far?

Although I spent a bit of time entering in my own bookmarks I actually spent a much greater amount of time simply browsing around to see what bookmarks other people have created, what tags they have used, how many people have bookmarked the same bookmark and then the different tags people have used for the same bookmark. The structure of the information really does have a life of its own and I wonder how long before someone does a research paper on it…