kadyellebee

By now, you’ve probably noticed that my posts have looked a bit different lately. I’ve had a hard time keeping up with the things I want to share, and the time I’ve had to share them has been limited... So when I saw Meredith starting to make posts with delicious, it cried out "copy me!!!" because it was easier than PIE!

del.icio.us is a link sharing tool. And they recently opened up a new way of automatically posting your bookmarked links of the day to your Weblog (using Movable Type, TypePad, and maybe Blogger).

You can do this too. By setting up your own del.icio.us account, and then going to http://del.icio.us/settings/USERNAME/daily where you replace USERNAME with your username, it gives you an option to set up your own "thingy" that posts the information to your weblog at a predetermined time. The instructions for each of these thingy controls can be found in a post on the delicious-discuss list: preview: post to an MT blog from delicious.

Now, once you have that set up, you can easily post by snatching one of the del.icio.us bookmarklets or use an extension in FireFox, or FeedDemon to make a fast post. With all these options, its easy to do a quick 30-second addition of something, including description.

Since I already had a category in kdlb-links for my link blog (Express Links), I just made a subcategory of that called delicious so it would easily be added into my blog. This uses a few plugins, Compare and Global Listings, to already put that one category from kdlb-links into kadyellebee. I added some CSS to enhance the listing to my main "basic.css" stylesheet that all skins load up.

When I want to talk about something cool I find, I click my bookmarklet or use whatever delicious tool is closest, and come up with the quickest tags (keywords that I think of when I access this link - usually something like "home improvement" would be written like homeimprovement to keep the spaces separating it from making a new category of home and improvement) and then a speedy comment like I would have in an Express Link. This literally takes no more than a minute, and then whenever delicious checks my bookmarks again, they get posted. No need to open a window of MT to post (my host has had some problems lately and I’m timing out a lot, so that needs my attention when I have time again!), it just does it.

A few things, though... Citations using this are harder because I’d always like to mention where I found it, but there’s not a good place for that. So I’ve been putting a text URL in the commentary like via amanita.net even though it doesn’t link back to Meredith I’ll have to do some more looking to see if I can find a better way to do this.

And its not real time, but that doesn’t really matter as much - if I really want to share something instantly, I can still make my own post, no biggie.

So yeah, its been a happy week because even though I haven’t gotten to blog much, I’ve been able to share a few quick links that were interesting to me. Yay!