Nerve Endings Firing Away

If you have observed, this blog now has at least one post every day that is titled, Links for (date). This feature was primarily, to help share the links I bookmark on Delicious everyday and secondly, to keep the blog updated more frequently. Unlike before, I don’t blog often and even when I do, the content is mostly personal. The earlier Asides and tips/howto posts have been reduced to mere links shared on Twitter or bookmarked on Delicious. Before asking if you like this feature, I would like to quickly describe how to set it up on your blog

Obviously, you need to have a Delicious account and I’m sure anyone who reads content online and loves bookmarking will have one. Next, you need to set up the schedule for daily posting so you need to log in to your Delicious account and follow the steps below:

• Click Settings.
• Click Daily Blog Posting (right at the bottom of the Settings page)
• Click Add a New Blog Posting Job.
• Now fill out the following information in the appropriate fields:
• job_name : Enter the title of your choice (does not display)
• out_name : [WordPress Admin Username]
• out_pass : [WordPress Admin Password]
• out_url : http :// [Blog URL] /xmlrpc.php
• out_time : Enter the time you want the posts to appear each day. 0= 7:00 p.m. Eastern Time
• out_blog_id : 1
• out_cat_id : Enter the category I.D. you want to use. It may post to your default category.
• Click Submit Query.

That’s it. Now continue bookmarking on Delicious and wait for your first post to appear on your blog. You can check out my typical post on how it appears.

Now, obviously there are some things I like to change. First, I don’t want the tags to appear below every link or at least want to restrict the number. I usually like to use as many tags as possible to help search through the bookmarks when I need them. So a long list of tag links often overwhelm the original link. Second, I would like to post only links that belong to a certain tag e.g. NEFA so that all links I bookmark on Delicious do not appear in the blog post. The only way I can prevent a link from appearing on the daily blog post is to make it private within Delicious but not all links are really private. Finally, I would like to edit my post titles containing the links. At present, I’ve to manually edit them after they are posted.

There are some solutions for the above problems but none address all my problems. The Yet Another Daily Delicious plugin and Postalious plugin (needs SimplePie Core) are the closest I’ve seen that achieve the same results. But I rather not have another plugin unless I absolutely need one so I continue to use the feature on Delicious.com website.

Have you found these daily link-posts useful? Have you clicked on any of them? My Feedburner stats tell me, they’ve been clicked on quite a few time but I would love to know how and what exactly you found useful.

PS. There is another bookmarking service that I found – Pinboard. But more on why it is better than Delicious later. Part of the reason is that Yahoo, which bought Delicious in 2005, has failed to actively keep up the development of Delicious (like improving the daily blog posting feature; see this response by the Community Manager at Delicious) and I fear it may be on its way out.