Keith Devens .com

Integrating del.icio.us with my site: questions

I've mostly decided to integrate del.icio.us with my site. Before I do, however, I just wanted to talk out loud and ask for feedback on some things.

It's been interesting because as I've recently tended towards long, link-heavy posts I've gotten varying feedback. Some considered them "information overload", some love the links posts ( ), and others like the link posts, but don't like the update schedule. If I added many links throughout the day the post kept constantly popping up in people's RSS aggregators because of the update. Since I got those comments I've tried to only update as few times a day as possible in batches rather than updating for individual links. On a related note, Erik, linkblogger extraordinaire, would often link to my link posts, but if I wound up initially having a link post with only a few ok links but later filling it with tons of great links Erik would pass it by. That leads me to believe that his aggregator doesn't handle updated posts the same way -- maybe if a post has been deleted in the aggregator it doesn't show up again if it's been updated. (Erik, care to comment?)

So, one of my biggest questions has to do with update times. Should I pull the links from del.icio.us only once a day, in which case I'm likely to have "stale" links by the time they wind up on my site, or maybe as many as four times a day (of course, only updating if there are new links)? The bigger problem here, however, is that del.icio.us does everything in UTC, while I'm in Eastern time. I'd like to work with it on Eastern time, so if I ask for links for "today" or "yesterday" (giving it the actual date, of course), I want it to give me "my" day, not Greenwich's day.

The other main problem is that the format is constraining. A lot of times I want to have something like:

• Dan: The Pain of Text

or I want to have some descriptive text before I give the link. You can see my most recent link post for examples of things that would be impossible to do within del.icio.us's format.

Finally, it limits you to 255 (I assume) characters of "extended" text. Sure, if I have anything lengthy to say it should probably be put in its own post. But 255 is rather short, and given that I'm going to be sticking "via" URLs (among others) in my extended entries, it's even shorter.

By the way, hands down the feature I love the most about del.icio.us is the pop-up poster. Though, for some reason it works as a pop-under for me.

Permalink | 3 Comments | id 4682

05:42 (utc-5)
edited: 06:31 (utc-5)