Integrating Del.icio.us with your weblog

As I touched on yesterday, I moved my ‘linkblog’ over to del.icio.us and was working on a way to merge those bookmarks with this site. After thinking about the various ways to do this, I came across an HTML generator on the del.icio.us site. It certainly isn’t the prettiest solution, but I figured it was something I could get up and running in a matter of minutes.

The basic idea is that del.icio.us will return a chunk of HTML as per the arguments you supply it. The URI for my request looks like this:

`https://del.icio.us/html/jblanton/?&count=25

&rssbutton=no&bullet=&divclass=bit&aclass=bit_link`

After figuring out the syntax it was just a matter of coming up with a way to pull it off the del.icio.us server. I decided to use Perl and the following is all the code that was needed. [Note that this could be done in one line with something like curl: curl https://address -o file.txt]

#!/usr/bin/perl
use LWP::Simple;
$bits = get https://del.icio.us/html/user/your/args;
open(FILE, >/path/to/the/file/you/want/to/write/to);
print FILE $bits;
close(FILE);

You could obviously use PHP or JavaScript to yank this information down each time the page is loaded, but why hit the del.icio.us server every time someone requests a page from you? Instead, just create a cron job that runs the above script every 15 minutes or so and then include the returned file in pages that are requested by your users. I use PHP for the include:

<?php include('/path/to/file'); ?>

Finally, you’ll need to modify your CSS so that the text you’ve pulled down from del.icio.us gets styled inline with the rest of your site.

Like I said, there are a million different ways to bring your del.icio.us bookmarks into your site, but this seemed like the simplest to me. If I decide on a different method in the future, I’ll be sure to outline instructions for that method here.