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July, 2005

Including del.icio.us Inline on MT

Alright, for all you geeks out there, you're probably wondering how I include my del.icio.us links inline. Well, the process includes two perl scripts and three Movable Type plugins. Here's the breakdown:

Plugins

1. MTSwitch: I use MTSwitch to differentiate the styling on links and entries. I use MTSwitch within tags from . . .

2. MTMultiBlog: This plugin allows me to easily include entries from multiple blogs within one page. All you do is use the <MTMultiBlog> tag and tell it which blogs to include (by using the blog id numbers).

3. Tags: This plugin takes the Movable Type keywords field and lets you use it to tag entries. Essentially what you can do is type out the categories you want to include your entry in and it will automatically create those categories if needed. I used this because it easily work with . . .

Perl Scripts

1. Linkblog del.icio.us Script: I originally found this great script from Squarewithin which got me pretty close to where I wanted to be, except I couldn't get the categories to work. So, after finding Brad Choate's Tags plugin, I decided to just cut the whole categories section and tell the script to just write the tags as keywords (now tags). Here is the final version of the script (after my tweaks) (just save it and change extension to .cgi).

After setting up some cron jobs to call to my script, the only thing left was to make the site rebuild. I couldn't figure out why it wasn't happening with the linkblog script, but it wasn't a problem once I found . . .

2. MT-Rebuild: This is just a perl scrip that rebuilds MT blogs. Simple, easy and effective.

That was pretty much it, the only other thing I did was change the call to grab del.icio.us links to http://del.icio.us/api/posts/all instead of http://del.icio.us/api/posts/recent so I could go back and grab all my old links the first time. Now all I do is grab my recent links ever 15 minutes and rebuild the site accordingly. Nice and easy.

I wrote this late and I'm tired, if you've got any questions just leave a comment.

Update (7/15/05): I may have jumped the gun a bit on this, turns out rebuilding an MT blog with 2800 entries and hundreds of categories is a little problematic. I considered just rebuilding the blog once a night and rebuilding my index template more often, but then the link won't work to allow commented. Oh my, oh me. Anyone with any ideas?

July 14, 2005
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Noah Brier | Thanks for reading. | Don't fake the funk on a nasty dunk.