Patrick Beeson

Folks browsing the latest entries on my blog should have noticed a few entries containing a daily summary of links I've tagged in the social bookmarking Web site del.icio.us.

These link summaries are not something I've posted by hand, but rather through an experimental feature offered by del.icio.us called "daily blog posting."

I assume this is simply a crontab from del.icio.us' end that hooks into your blog CMS using the provider's API. It works with the most popular blogging software, including Movable Type, Wordpress and Typepad.

Here's a guide to setting up a daily link posting, or "thingy" as del.icio.us calls it.

NOTE: You'll need a del.icio.us account before you use this service obviously.

1. Add a job name -- The job_name is the name for your posting "thingy." You can name this whatever you like; I named mine dailylinks.
2. Add an out name -- This is the login name you use for your blog. If you use Movable Type 4, this is the username you use to log in to your admin.
3. Add an out pass -- This is your "Web services password" associated with your user account, at least in Movable Type 4. You can find it by going to your user profile within your system settings. (You'll have to "reveal" it first.)
4. Add an out url -- This is the full URL of the XML-RPC interface for your blog, which probably ends in something like mt-xmlrpc.cgi. This should be located within your Movable Type directory.
5. Add an out time -- This is the hour (from 0-23 in GMT) to post your links at every day. I have mine set to "10" for a morning posting of around 6:30 a.m.
6. Add an out blog id -- This is your blog ID number (which is probably 1 if you have only one blog).
7. Add an out cat id -- This is an optional setting for the category ID number in your blog where you'd like to put these posts. I send mine to a category I've called "links," which happens to be category No. 25. You can find the category number in Movable Type 4 by examining the URL for the category within the "Manage Categories" section within your blog admin.

Once you've configured your daily blog posting thingy, you'll need to wait until the following day to see if everything works. It took me a few days to realize I needed the Web services password instead of my primary user password, but after that was fixed the posts went through like clockwork.

Aside from letting your readers know what you're bookmarking, this feature has an added benefit of increasing your site's SEO through a daily shot of link juice. Just take care to link to sites that won't harm your PageRank (such as sites violating Google's policies).

Though this is an experimental feature, I'd eventually like to see more control over the blog posts markup. There are a lot of unneeded class names and "div" tags thrown in that could be tossed out.

But overall, this is a great feature being offered by the most essential service on the Internet outside of Google.