How to Post Daily Del.icio.us Links to Your Movable Type Blog

By leelefever on May 1, 2005 - 4:51pm.

• Categories:
• Technology in Plain English
• Comments: 3

It took me a while to get into del.icio.us. My initial impression was that the interface is not ready for prime time and seems too geeky. That impression stands, but has been surmounted by experiencing del.icio.us's sheer usefulness and simplicity.

What I’m describing today is a way to bookmark a web site using Del.icio.us and have that bookmark (along with others from that day) automatically show up on your Movable Type blog, once every 24 hours. The blog posts looks like this.

I figured out how to do this by stumbling through and I hope this post will keep others from spending too much time on it.

• First, you need a del.icio.us account. You can do that here.
• Second, to benefit from these directions, you need to have a Movable Type blog. My version is 2.65.

With these things in place, you can get started.

Step 1: We're going to get your browser set up for quick bookmarking. (If you use a bookmarklet to post to del.icio.us, move on to Step 2)

You should see a part of your web browser that is called “links” or “bookmarks”. In most cases, you should be able to drag a hyperlink (sometimes called a "bookmarklet") into the “links” section, where it becomes a persistent part of the browser.

Once you've found the Links area, log into del.icio.us, go to the "post" page, where you'll find the link that says “post to del.icio.us”. Drag that link into the Links part of your browser. new and improved links are here.

Once you have the link in your browser, you have an easy way to bookmark web sites - and you’re done with step one.

Step 2: Set up the Daily Links. Be logged into del.icio.us and click on => Settings => Daily Blog Posting. This will take you to a page with a table and link to “Add a New Thingy”. Click the link and you’ll see this:

I know – it's wicked geeky and has no documentation…I'll walk you through it.

• job_name: This can be whatever you want, just give it a name. I called my first one “CraftLinks”

   

   

• out_name: The username you use to log into Movable Type

   

   

• out_pass: The password you use to log into Movable Type

   

   

• out_url: This one can be tough. Inside your Movable Type Directory, there is a file called “mt-xmlrpc.cgi”. You need to be able to provide the hyperlink to that file. So, the url would be: http://yoursitedomain/nameofyourMTdirectory/mt-xmlrpc. For example, mine is: http://www.leelefever.com/mt/mt-xmlrpc.cgi.

   

   

• out_time: The time you’d like the links to be posted every day. The value should between 0 and 23, based on GMT. A value of “7” means a post at midnight, Seattle time, 3am New York time.

   

   

• out_blog_id: To find this, log into Movable Type and click on the blog you’d like to post to. Notice the “blog_id” at the end of the url. The “blog_id=X” is your blog ID. Mine is 5.

   

   

• out_cat_id: This one is optional and I haven’t figured it out yet. I can’t get the posts to post to a category. However, you should be able to find the ID by logging into MT, click “Categories” on the left and then “edit category attributes” for the category you’d like to post to. After you click the attributes link, look at the URL. The last number in the URL is the category ID (I think).

Once this is filled in, click “Submit Query” and you should see a table with the information you provided in the correct fields and something that says: “results: new job -- nothing yet” This just means you haven’t tagged anything yet.

Adding a Del.icio.us bookmark

You should now have everything set up to start bookmarking and having the bookmarks show up on your blog.

I encourage you to do a test run and go to a web site and click that handy bookmarklet you added to the links on your browser. Clicking the bookmarklet will take you to a del.icio.us page, with some fields filled in. If you want, add an extended description and tags. Click “save” and you’ll return to the original page. Sometime in the next 24 hours, you should see a new entry appear on your blog that contains the link to the site you just bookmarked.

Thanks to a couple of sites that helped me get started…

Kevin Wen
How Now BrownPau

If you use WordPress, this might help you.

Check out all the cool tools you can use to extend your del.icio.us experience too.