Delicious and Movable Type

I've been using del.icio.us more and more recently. If you don't know about it, Delicious is a way of sharing links and bookmarks with other people. Because so many people are involved and actively sharing useful sites, it can also be a great resource in navigating the web. It's helped me out more than a few times lately as I hammer out a few freelance projects and need some new trouble shooting resources.

Using Delicious is also really simple, especially if you are a Firefox user. Default posting of links to del.icio.us is done via a little bookmarklet. It's fairly simple but not as easy as it could be. That's where the Delicious Firefox extension comes in. With it, all you have to do is right click on the page you are browsing and fill in your tags. That's it. I can't help but bookmark anything of even the slightest interest.

And FYI when I say username, I mean your Delicious username. If you don't have one, you can get one here.

Integrating Your Delicious RSS Feed into MT

But that's not the exciting part. You can also integrate your del.icio.us bookmarks into Movable Type. Initially I started doing this with Feedsplitter. Del.icio.us serves up an RSS feed of your links. Feedsplitter allows you display RSS feeds on any regular old web page, making it really easy to feed up your links in your sidebar.

The setup is really simple. Install Feedsplitter on a server with PHP following the instructions included with the download. Open your browser and point to where you installed Feedsplitter on your server. From there, plug in the location of your RSS feed - http://del.icio.us/rss/username - and Feedsplitter will spit out the code to put on your web page. It's just that simple.

Integrating Delicious Bookmarks as an MT Post

But that would be too easy, wouldn't it? I couldn't stop there. I want full integration into Movable Type with daily posts of my links and the ability to comment on those selections. I learned today that this apparently possible via the Movable Type Support Forums who apparently learned it from the Delicious-Discuss Mailing List.

Here's the deal: By going to http://del.icio.us/settings/username/daily, you can have Delicious spit out a daily post of what you've bookmarked straight to a new MT post. To do so, you'll have to enter in the following information:

• job_name: Whatever you want to call this thing, perhaps Daily Post or something similar.
• out_name: A username that can log into MT and create posts. I'd recommend creating a new one that can only make posts just to be safe.
• out_pass: The password for above username.
• out_url: This needs to be the complete url of wherever the mt-xmlrpc.cgi file is for your MT blog, probably the main folder of wherever you installed MT or where your mt.cgi file is.
• out_time: The time that you want this job to process in GMT. It appears that this is entered in just as the hour: 20 or 0. I found that my post processed at some point during that hour ... just in case you want to sit around and wait for it to happen.
• out_blog_id: The id number of your blog. To find it, log into MT like you normally would to post. Head to the blog where you'd like your bookmarks to appear. In the url, it should say at some point blog_id=X where X is your blog id.
• out_cat_id: The id number of the category in your blog where you'd like your post to go. Again this can be found by logging into MT, heading to the above mentioned blog, and pulling up the category details. In the url, it should say at some point category&blog_id=X&id=Y where Y is your category id.

That's it. At the specified time, Delicious should post the pages you've bookmarked in the last 24 hours to your blog. Simple as that.