Semantic export of Del.icio.us for a Links blog

A pretty dry post heading yes, but for good reason. I spent a whole bunch of time searching on google for precisely this and couldn’t find anything, so descriptive titles it is.

Edit: I broke it:( Need to work out caching issues but that shouldnt take too long. Del.icio.us rss feeds were down. Still need to work out the caching stuff though

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a bit late when it comes to getting on the web2 bandwagon and so it is that I’ve only recently discovered how cool del.icio.us is. For those who don’t know, del.icio.us is a social bookmarking tool. Which means a way to share all the links that you think are cool. As I’m currently freelancing, it means that I have access to my bookmarks no matter where I’m working from. Very Cool! Anyway, enough about me. On to actually exporting del.icio.us

del.icio.us actually has a couple of built in link roll javascript type functions that work fairly well. The problem with these though is that one, they’re client-side, which Mark explained to me is bad, bad, bad and two, they spit out markup that’s with a lot of excess classes and the like. I wanted something that I could format the links and description as I wanted in a nice semantic definition list with no excess markup.

After a lot of searching I ended up finding MagpieRSS which is dead easy to install, download, unzip, upload the four .inc files to a folder called magpierss in the root of your website. That easy. Now, I don’t know squat about php but after a little help from a forum was given the basic code for what I needed to put together. Then after a little bit of tricking about came out with.


<br /> <?php<br /> require_once('magpierss/rss_fetch.inc');<br /> ?></p> <p><?php<br /> $url = 'http://del.icio.us/rss/Peter.Costello/!domestik';<br /> $rss = fetch_rss($url);<br /> echo " <dl>“;<br /> foreach ($rss->items as $item ) {<br /> $title = $item[title];<br /> $url = $item[link];<br /> $desc = $item[description];<br /> echo “ <dt><a href=\"$url\">$title</a></dt> <dd>$desc</dd> <p>“;<br /> }<br /> echo “</dl> <p>“;<br /> ?><br />


So after a couple of days trying to find out how to get clean semantic output it actually only took about 20 minutes to get it all sorted. Hopefully this will help someone out without too much google searching.