Sidebar links with de.licio.us | The Hickensian

Update – For various reasons I’ve decided to keep going with my Textpattern version, but the information is here if you need it. Word of warning though – make sure you know what you’re doing with the cache.

I’ve just moved my sidenotes links from the inbuilt textpattern system to de.licio.us, a service I’ve been using more and more over the last couple of months. There was nothing wrong with the Textpattern method, its just that using de.licio.us makes these links a little easier to find again. Now I post my sidenotes using Cocoalicious, a beautfully simple cocoa interface to the de.licio.us api. If the site I want to post is in Safari, I just select ‘New post from Safari’ in Cocoalicious, and it pre-populates the fields. Each tag in de.licio.us can have its own RSS feed, so all that was left was how to integrate the links on my journal pages.

This was solved by an article by Richard Eriksson, and here are the steps I took:

Started adding links with the tag ‘notes’, making sure that I added a wee description at the same time.
Uploaded the Magpie RSS Parser to my server, adding a sub-folder called ‘cache’. By default, Magpie will cache the rss feed (if you’ve setup a cache folder) for an hour, so the de.licio.us server doesn’t get hit at every page load.
Uploaded a new php file with Richard Erikssons’ code. All I had to add was the correct username (in this case, adding /notes/ on after that), and ensuring the path to the Magpie parser was right.
include the php file into journal pages. job done.