Going oldschool with del.icio.us – handing over Techthursday

For the last few months, I have always collected some links from my reader every Thursday morning and published them on the Yahoo Developer Network blog. Now that I am leaving Yahoo people asked me how that would go on. As I cannot access the blog from outside the company network I said I’d build a system that allows the editor taking over to simply copy and paste the collected links in the morning.

Update: Apparently that wasn’t needed as Tom is taking over Tech Thursday:

Anyways, the script still works :)

Normally I would use YQL to do something like that but I once again found that sometimes the most simple is the best.

I am using del.icio.us to collect my links anyways, so I thought the easiest is to tag the ones I want added with “4ydn”. That took care of the collection. Now to add the description for all the links, I just used the notes field in delicious and a placeholder. For example “{3D Pong in jQuery} is quite a lot of fun”:

All I needed to do then is getting the links as a JSON object and replace the opening brace with the anchor opening tag and the closing brace with the anchor closing tag.

You can get the links as JSON with the tried-and-true delicious feed output http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/json/codepo8/4ydn?count=50&callback=ydntt

The function for display then is very simple indeed:

Putting all together there is now the Techthursday generator.

Tags: del.icio.us, generator, techthursday