As you may remember, I was quite disappointed at the 255 character limit for the notes in del.icio.us bookmarks. However, while I was wondering around aimlessly trying to cure my disappointment, I stumbled upon Twitter.In the process of figuring out what Twitter was all about, I saw that someone somewhere around the world was “moving [their] bookmarks from del.icio.us to Google bookmarks”. I hadn’t heard of Google bookmarks before so I decided to find out more about it. And to my surprise it was pretty much what I was looking for. I did some testing and found out that the notes in Google bookmarks can fit at least 500 (and probably many more) characters, the labels support spaces, and the bookmarklet is a lot better since it opens in a new window instead of replacing the page I want to bookmark. That was on Friday.
The rest of the weekend I was fighting against Google to be able to access the RSS feed for the bookmarks using PHP. Unfortunately after trying with pretty much every version of Snoopy I could find (the newest official version, the one that comes with MagpieRSS, and this one), I was still unsuccessful. I then tried to use Google Authentication to access the feed, but apparently the bookmark service is not supported. In fact, it seems like no one really cares about the bookmark service. The closest thing I could find was the Search History RSS feed which is a bit more popular, and even has its own Mac OS X widget. I tried mimicking what the widget did to get the RSS feed, but again, I was not very successful. However I did manage to find out that I needed to generate a random string for the zx parameter in the URL, otherwise Google would redirect the request and the authentication would no longer work. However even with that knowledge I still couldn’t get any of the versions of Snoopy to open the feed. Finally, my brother decided to give the problem a try using a Java servlet instead of PHP, and after a while, with the knowledge that he needed to generate the zx parameter, he got it working. My guess is that the implementation of digest authentication in Snoopy does something that Google doesn’t like, and since I don’t really want to waste my time sniffing packages to see exactly what is going wrong and making my own digest implementation for Snoopy, I decided to use my brother’s Java servlet to get the feed. However, since this is not really a nice solution and most people don’t even have support for Java servlets in their servers I probably won’t release this plugin.
As for Postalicious, from now on I won’t be using it myself, but in case someone wants to give it a try I decided to release it. You can download it here.
PS: I know “de-introducing” is not a word, but I don’t really care 😛
Great Idea, but doesn’t work. After clicking on “Update Now”…
Warning: file_get_contents(https://[email protected]/v1/posts/get?dt=2007-02-06) [function.file-get-contents]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /../wp-content/plugins/wp-postalicious.php on line 376And…
Could not connect to del.icio.usI’m using WP 2.1.
I did some research and found out that
file_get_contentsdoes not work with all hosts. I just released Postalicious 1.05 which first tries to use CURL to contact del.icio.us, and only usesfile_get_contentsif CURL is unavailable. This should fix the problem ad mentioned in the comment above.hi, I’m a bit confused here with the ‘de-introducing’ your new plugin.
So, you why have de-introduced it so quickly even though you have not figured out how to make Google Bookmarks behave yet in a similar manner?
I like the idea of using Google Bookmarks, though.
jd
The reason I “de-introduced” Postalicous is because I probably won’t be making any big changes to it, I’ll fix any bugs I find, but I won’t be adding new features since I don’t use it anymore.
Actually I already have a modified version of Postalicious that uses Google Bookmarks instead of del.icio.us. The problem is that the implementation is very messy, as I mentioned in the post I was able to authenticate with Google, just not in the plugin’s code. My brother came up with a Java servlet that authenticates with Google Bookmarks and fetches de RSS feed. After that I parse the RSS using MagpieRSS which is bundled with WordPress. However, to get the Ultimate Tag Warrior Integration to work I had to slightly modify the code that MagpieRSS uses to parse the XML file.
In short, I do have Google bookmarks working in pretty much the same way as Postalicious does (in fact my last links post was generated using my Google bookmarks), but the implementation is very local and is not really a WordPress plugin, it’s just a WordPress hack, and until I find a way to make a stand-alone plugin, I don’t think it’s worth releasing it.
thanks for the explanation and I hope you can get google to cooperate.
I’ll give your De-introduced plugin try 🙂
Hi – I don’t know id you’re able (or willing!) to help me with this but…
I installed postalicious, and everything is set up, I go to update and get “Update successful, no new posts found”. Even though I have 6 or 7 new links on delicious.
Any ideas where I could start troubleshooting?
All the best,
Chris.
I probably should have labeled the “Update Now” button differently since it seems like many people expect it to do something else than what it does. When you click the “Update Now” button the first thing Postalicious does is find out what time it is right now in GMT. Then it will go ahead and get the bookmarks for YESTERDAY, so it doesn’t matter how many bookmarks you add, Postalicious won’t fetch them until after the day is over. The reason for this is the the main purpose of Postalicious is to create posts with your daily bookmarks. By grabbing yesterday’s bookmarks Postalicous makes sure that you won’t add any new bookmarks after it has done its daily update.
Chris: Hopefully that’s why Postalicious is not adding your bookmarks, however if that’s not the case then I would like to hear more about this issue.
Thank you! Yes – it does look like the update now button should do an update, but I probably also didn’t read the instructions fully. I’ll leave it overnight and see how it goes. Thanks for replying, much appreciated (and for the plugin!).
Chris.
To everyone reading this, PLEASE upgrade to version 1.08 of the plugin, otherwise you’ll probably have problems with Postalicious displaying dates.
Any chance of limiting the posted links to only one tag?
TourPro: I don’t really plan to support that as a feature, but there are a couple of things you can do to achieve that behavior. First, write the only tag you wish to use in “Use these tags for all Postalicious posts”. Then you can do one of the following: 1) You could just not tag your del.icio.us bookmarks, although that’s not a very good solution. 2) The other solution is to open
wp-postalicious.phpand either delete the block near line 612 that says:if($nd_utw_status == 'yes' && $attrs['TAG'] != 'system:unfiled') { if($newtags == '') $newtags .= $attrs['TAG']; else $newtags .= ' ' . $attrs['TAG']; }Or simply add “/*” before
ifand “*/” after}(both, without the quotes). This will ignore the tags in the del.icio.us bookmarks.I just noticed I misunderstood TourPro’s comment. I though you meant limiting the posts by Postalicious to one UTW tag, but if you meant limiting the del.icio.us bookmarks, then here’s how:
Somewhere around line 595 there should be a line inside the function
neop_del_startthat reads:just replace it with:
where tag_name is the name of the tag you want the bookmarks to have.
Awesome, thanks for the response! I love playing with this stuff and will give that a try.
I too feel somewhat limited by the 255 character limit, but I mostly use this for feeding a “news” linkroll. Mostly I snip a bit of the article, sometimes some comment. I figure if there was more to say, it should deserve its own blog post. This will be perfect to automatically create a nightly “News Roundup”. Cheers!