Yummy : A Del.icio.us plug-in for Movable Type

27 Jun 05
● Development
● Perl
● Software

Sure, several of these plug-ins already exist. Mine has the following advantages:

  • You don't need to know any code to get it working.
  • It uses the RSS feeds, as opposed to the potentially volatile Delicious API.
  • It caches feeds locally so you don't suck Delicious' bandwidth.
  • You can easily filter by tag and username.
  • I wrote it

OK, so i did it as a small exercise in Perl, but if you use Movable Type it's a great
way to keep all your links upto date and in order, since the numerous Delicious browser plug-ins make it so easy to store bookmarks as you browse. The links on the left-hand right-hand side of the index page here at quotesque.net are all tagged 'sidebar', for example.

Download

If you find the plug-in useful or even like it, then a simple 'thank you'
is always appreciated. If you use the code then include a reference to me.

Requirements

This plug-in is tested on Movable Type 3.16/3.17.

Should work in 3.0, 3.01D but haven't checked.

You need the XML::RSS::Parser perl module. It's available to download
free.

Installation

To install, place the Yummy.pl file in your Movable Type 'plugins'
directory. If you do not have a Movable Type plugins directory, create one,
then put the Yummy.pl file in it. Refer to the Movable Type documentation
for more information regarding plugins. So make sure Yummy is here:

MT_DIR/plugins/Yummy.pl

The functionality in MT-Yummy requires the use of the LWP::UserAgent,
HTTP::Request and XML::Parser modules, so you'll need to make sure they are
installed on your web host. These are very common modules.

Yummy additionally requires the XML::RSS::Parser module. This is less common.
Get it from the URL above (cf. Requirements). Unarchive it and place the 'RSS'
directory within into

MT_DIR/extlib/XML/

The first part of the package name (in this case, XML), indicates the directory.
If the 'XML' directory doesn't exist in your 'extlib' directory, then create it
before uploading the "RSS" directory.

Last but not least, you need to make a new directory called 'yummy' in your MT root directory:

MT_DIR/yummy/

And you need to set the permissions on the directory to 0777. Your ftp software
should give you a way of setting permissions. 0777 means anyone can read/write/execute in that directory.

Using Yummy in Movable Type Templates

Three usage examples. From basic to advanced:

Basic:


<MTDeliciousLinks username="Hasselhoff">
<a href="<$MTDeliciousLinkURL$>"><$MTDeliciousLinkTitle$></a>
<br />
</MTDeliciousLinks>

Including this code in your MT template will display a list of links from
Delicious user "Hasselhoff", with one link on each line. Because "lastn" has
not been specified, it will by default retrieve only the last 20 links posted.

Pretty Basic:


<MTDeliciousLinks username="Hasselhoff/groovy" lastn="15">
<a href="<$MTDeliciousLinkURL$>"><$MTDeliciousLinkTitle$></a>
<br />
</MTDeliciousLinks>

This looks like the last example, except it retrieves links which user
"Hasselhoff" has tagged with the keyword "groovy". Like this you can display
categorised link lists. It also specifies how many links - the last 15
posted by date.

The Good Stuff:


<ul>
<MTDeliciousLinks username="MyUsername/kraut">
<li><a href="<$MTDeliciousLinkURL$>"><$MTDeliciousLinkTitle$></a> 
posted by <$MTDeliciousLinkAuthor$> on <$MTDeliciousLinkDate$></li>
</MTDeliciousLinks>
</ul>

Ok this one has the works. It prints a bulleted list of links tagged "kraut"
by user "MyUsername", including the person who posted the link and the
date it was posted on.

Hopefully these illustrate how you can use Yummy to manage your link
lists, blogrolls etc on your Movable Type site. Coupled with the numerous
Del.icio.us tools, this is a very convenient way to keep your categorised links fresh.

See the readme in the downloader for more info.