Category: 
Over the past week or so, I’ve been experimenting with the daily blog posting function provided by del.icio.us. It seems to work pretty well, automatically creating a new post on this blog containing the links I’ve tagged that day. If you have a del.icio.us account and want to try using it, go to your Settings page, then select "daily blog posting" to create a new posting job. You’ll be faced with providing the following parameters for the job:
job_name: This can be any name you want.
out_name: The name you use to log in to your blog.
out_pass: The password you use to log in to your blog.
out_url: Described as "full URL of the XML-RPC interface for your blog" which, for this WordPress blog, is http://www.afewgoodpens.com/blog/xmlrpc.php. I’m not sure what is is for the other supported blog software, but it’s likely that someone else has tried if for yours — so check the platform’s forums or other help pages. I found the correct URL for WordPress, for example, on the WordPress Codex. If you try to execute the URL, and get a message along the lines of "XML-RPC server accepts POST requests only" — you’ve probably got the right one to use.
out_time: This is the time of day that you want posts to appear, in Greenwich Mean Time. For help with Greenwich Mean Time, go here. So far, it seems typical that the blog posts appear within 20-30 minutes of the specified hour (and, no, refreshing the page repeatedly won’t make them appear any faster).
out_blog_id: I’m not sure what this one’s actually for, but I entered "1" and it worked. I’m assuming that if you have more than one blog that you access with the same profile and password, this number might vary.
out_cat_id: The category you want the blog posting assigned to. Note that this is a category number, not the category itself. In WordPress, that translates to the id number associated with the category, which you can find by selecting Manage / Categories. In my case, the id number is 27, which is associated with the posting category "Internet Clippings."
That’s it! Easy!
Here’s a sample of one of my daily blog postings.
You’ll see that the entry was correctly categorized as Internet Clippings, and that the tags I assigned to the bookmark appear as del.icio.us tags at the end of each one. Clicking the tags takes you to all the bookmarks for the same tag associated with your del.icio.us profile. I might have preferred it to take you to everyone’s posts with that tag, since there are other ways to incorporate links to del.icio.us tags on a blog. Maybe an option to do that would be nice.
Any notes that you typed when you tagged the link also appear. There’s an unfortunate limitation of 255 characters for the notes, so what I try to do is clip a key sentence or two from the article that I think gets to its essential point. I’d like to include a comment or two of my own with each one, but I can barely take a breath that uses less than 255 characters, so I’ll have to wait until the next version of del.icio.us — which I think increases this limit to 1000 characters per bookmark — to do that. With 1000 characters, bookmarking and daily blog posting would become an excellent shortcut way to read and comment on articles and web pages, and simultaneously set them up to automatically post to your blog.
This is a very busy time of year for me, so tools like this that actually do save time but help me keep things like this blog moving are extremely useful. Too many time-saving technologies take on a life of their own, sucking up energy while giving only the appearance of activity and progress while you sit back and wonder why you don’t seem to be getting anything done. An effective technological tool is one that results in actual time compression, collapsing the time required to perform a series of tasks while achieving the same, or acceptably similar, results.
. I’m sorry to hear about plumbing problems at your house. I’m pretty sure that it is a quite distraction when you hope to be able to spend times on other interesting...