dpwolf/blog

I’ve set up del.icio.us, a clever social bookmarking service to automatically post my daily links in the blog. I figure this place could do with a bit more activity and by adding a couple of lines of description to each link I can share the sites which catch my attention with a bit more clarity without having to sit down and write a proper post. I use del.icio.us quite a lot as I often move between different computers and locations.

While the daily post service is great, the interface for setting it up is a little clunky and cryptic unless you know what you’re doing. Thankfully Kevin Lim has written a helpful little guide to setting up del.icio.us with WordPress. It basically involves entering a username and password for your blog, the address of the xmlrpc.php file on your server, what time you’d like the post to occur in GMT and which category you’d like the post to appear in.

Another cool del.icio.us feature I’ve been meaning to post about for ages is the addition of RSS feeds for particular media types. Traditionally del.icio.us has provided RSS feeds of links for each tag, for example the RSS feed for links tagged “example” http://del.icio.us/tag/example is http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/example. Now, (since about halfway through last year actually) you can also search by media file type and generate RSS feeds for these complete with enclosures for use in podcasting applications like iTunes or FireAnt. So it can generate a feed of all the mp3 files people link to directly, or all the QuickTime movies or JPEG or MPEG files. Additionally, you can add tags to generate feeds of a particular media type about a particular topic, for example http://del.icio.us/tag/system:media:video+80s give you a collection of 1980s themed video files (mpeg, wmv, mov etc).

While I use iTunes as a media RSS client at the moment to harvest source clips which may be manipulated in live performance eventually it would be great to add a built in video RSS reader to my experimental video appliations (vidgets) and do live video searches.

[A disclaimer: subscribing to a feed of all mpeg or wmv files linked to by random strangers on the internet can lead to the automatic downloading of porn or other things you may not want on your hard drive (especially on a work or uni computer) so be careful eh ;-).]

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