Now that I’ve re-enabled tags (aka categories), I wanted to sync my WordPress tag navigation with del.icio.us, pulling in the del.icio.us links for the given tag. I’m not sure why some folks are set on creating blog entries for del.icio.us links; this seems like duplication of data to me. In any case, I just grabbed Magpie, and then wrote template-functions-rss.php, which grabs the RSS feed of links for the given tag (e.g. http://del.icio.us/rss/bdwelle/programming), and spits it out in HTML. Very, very straightforward.
In the meantime, I had to do a fair bit of hacking in the WordPress source. What a mess! I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again — tons of poor coding. Some functions return arrays or strings, some just barf out echos all over the place. Some functions do formatting, some don’t. Do I use post->ID or post_id? What’s global? Answer: Everything! Anyhow, it works, and I still like it well enough not to switch back to MT.
Other blogs commenting on this post –
September 29th, 2004 at 5:16 pm
Hey Bowen,
Glad to see Magpie is working for you.
The arguement about data duplication makes sense, but actually making entries out of one’s del.icio.us links means that when you start pulling data in from other sources (Flickr, Audioscrobbler, etc) your WP install is now your personalized data respository, and it will simpler to recombine the data in interesting ways. Thats the theory at least, as I haven’t even found the time to migrate to using WP full time, who knows.
Btw when you say “tags nee categories” does that mean you’re using my WP tags hack? Or something else? If so, how is that working for you?
September 29th, 2004 at 6:22 pm
Hi Kellan,
I see your point, in theory, but in my experience, duplication and
syncronization of data is usually _far_ more work than integration with a good existing data store.
That’s why delicious is so great — the data architecture is clean and simple,
and there are great access methods. The reason that I _do_ store images
as local “assets” in WP is simply because I don’t yet know know how much Flickr will charge me to store as many images as I have… If it’s cheap enough, I would probably use their service, and pull in the images from them via the same RSS integration method I used for delicious.
Re your hack, it looks awesome! I tried to make it work the other day, and I got as far as the tag input UI on the post screen, but I started getting errors all over the place from other functions. I’ll try again on a dev blog soon; I’d be happy to contribute to the code if I come up with some additions.
– Bowen