Phil Gyford

As a rule I try to keep things to myself, to stay in control. So once upon a time I was wary about posting photos to Flickr rather than keeping them safely on my own site. But I’ve found using Flickr an enjoyable experience, so I thought it time I took the plunge and set my links free too, and started using del.icio.us, the sociable bookmarking/link-blogging site that anyone cool started using long, long ago.

Thankfully other people have made the move before, and I followed Cameron Marlow’s excellent instructions on exporting links from Movable Type, importing to del.icio.us, and re-tagging them — a horrifically dull process (for 400 links) made bearable by Cameron’s handy perl scripts. So now my links are here.

Ideally, I’d also have the links appearing on my site, at the very least, on the front page. But I can’t see a simple way to do this that doesn’t send a request to del.icio.us every time my front page is loaded, which is far from the polite behaviour I was taught. I’ve tried Cameron’s script which uses Net::Delicious to grab recent links and write them to a file, but have had no luck so far; I keep getting “401 Authorization Required” whenever requesting recent_posts. Baffling, but probably something dumb on my part. I’ll work on a solution when more time appears from somewhere.

Another problem: what should be the RSS feed for my links doesn’t seem to have anything in it. Hopefully all these, and many other wrinkles, will be ironed out before long.