The previous post was the first on this site that was auto-generated by the del.icio.us “daily blog posting” feature. Geof has been doing this for a while, and I was already planning to do something like this on my own eventually, anyhow. But I hadn’t gotten a round tuit yet, and since I ran across a couple of links reminding me about this del.icio.us service yesterday, I decided to try it out. I’ve had a list of my most recent del.icio.us bookmarks in my sidebar for a long time now, but using the daily post feature will accomplish two positive things for me: it brings those bookmarks to my readers’ attention better, and it creates more frequent postings for my blog, even when I don’t have time to explicitly write something up.
There are two additional features that I wish it had. First, it would be nice if you had some control over the title of the post. As it is, it uses something like “links for 2006-03-15″. This is redundant, because the date is already on the post, and I’ve got them going into a category named “links”. It would also be nice to be able to have more control over the semantics of the links. For example, I’d like the links to use the rel-tag microformat. I might just need to whip up a plugin for that…
[...] I mentioned previously that I wanted to make a WordPress plugin that would touch up the posts created by the del.icio.us “daily blog post” feature. I’ve tinkered with it on-and-off, and finally realized what was preventing the addition of the rel=”tag” microformat (I forgot to double-escape some backslashes in a string). So, I present for your automated link posting pleasure, the del.icio.us daily blog post fixer plugin (.zip). [...]
[...] Thank you dougal for pointing out this great post. My previous post came from del.icio.us, and I think with my aside type hack on my theme it looks cool; granted the actual post needs some customization, but I’ll just let the brains that power del.icio.us sort that out [...]
Amen, brother!
I whipped up a quick-n-dirty plugin yesterday, but I haven’t had a chance to test it yet. More later…
I just started mine a few days ago also (apparently this is what LifeHacker has been doing) and definitely am looking for a way to tweak the title and layout, staying tuned to this thread to see what you come up with. Thx.
Dougal,
Can’t wait til its corrected. I have a ton of RSS with the symptoms you are trying to resolve but I agree with Morris “Why can’t WordPress fix this permanently?”
I think this is cool, definitely something I’ll be doing; although I think I might hack my theme so they look sort of ‘aside-ish’ first
What it really needs is a little template you can edit, a bit like how the Flickr send to blog tool works. I’ve been using it for a while, it seems to be pretty reliable.
It’s my constant downfall: so many ideas, so little time.
I was wondering, Dougal, when you’d stop futzing about with coming up with your own solution and just start letting the tool do the job for you while you made something better.