I just now discovered a very cool (albeit currently “experimental”) feature of del.icio.us that allows you to automatically make a blog post of all the sites you’ve tagged on a given day. I first came across this idea at Teknokool (a WordPress site), which inspired me to figure out how to do this on my Blogger site. My first hit was theory.isthereason, which posted on how to go about this with WordPress blogs. That post led me to another one on videoblogging.info, which offered help for users of Moveable Type, TypePad, WordPress, and Blogger (woo hoo!).
Although I followed the instructions on videoblogging.info to the letter, my initial attempts didn’t seem to work. All I can figure is that there wasn’t enough lead time for the script to take effect, because over night it worked like a charm. The main thing to keep an eye on is that the time you put in is GMT; I set mine up for 4 GMT, or 11 P.M. EST.
Last night’s link post was a bit redundant, as I had made regular posts for almost all of the tagged items. That fact could become a bit annoying, as I tag all items whether I post separate entries on them or not. However, I still think this could be pretty cool, as I will now be able to automate smaller link posts. And of course it will allow me to “post” more often. 😉 Let me know what you think…
Update: I was able to play with the CSS a little bit, so I think it looks a little better now. I made sure that the fonts conformed to the rest of the site, made the line breaks a little larger, and changed the default bullets to small del.icio.us icons. I do still have several gripes with all of this, though.
No blog title is generated by this method, so I have to go back and manually edit that after the fact to ensure that the permalink title is not based on the entire post of the text. Also, there doesn’t seem to be any way to add the link=“rel” descriptor into the tags to ensure that Technorati etc. pick up the posts, so that too is a little bit annoying. If anyone has any experience or advice with this, I’d appreciate it…
