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Thomas Pierce (How To Blog For Fun & Profit!) points to a post by Debbie Weil who is lately getting all delirious about del.icio.us. She’s not the only one and, indeed, I have been playing with this toy tool myself recently as part of the redevelopment of my soon-to-be lately combined sites.
Adding one neat trick to Debbie’s list of things to do with del.icio.us, this post by Oleg Kourapov on 43things shows how he is integrating items posted to del.icio.us into a sidebar, using a tweaked PHP script (original Integrating del.icio.us with PHP and Magpie at MovableBlog.)
I have and do use other RSS to PHP parsers, but del.icio.us seems to have it’s own way of doing things, so they don’t work for this. This method has the advantage that, while it works for del.icio.us, it also works for other feeds, so once you’re set up, there’s no end to the fun you can have!
(And this won’t cost you anything either.)
Don’t let the geek-speak put you off, this is easier than falling off a log! Trust me. Don’t bother to read all the gunge on Magpie, just download the Feed2Js script (offered as open-source under a GNU General Public License by Alan Levine (Maricopa Community Colleges)) - this might come in handy too, but remember that using javascript to display content is not search engine friendly, like integrated HTML or PHP is.
Importantly, Feed2Js includes all the Magpie files you’ll need to use the PHP script to integrate your del.icio.us stuff (and a whole lot of other RSS feeds) into your site. It requires very little editing in a text editor to set up and, in reality, just requires uploading half a dozen files. Very easy.
The next step, is integrating that into a proper laid out page. I prefer to do this in a two-step method, because I use .html extensions for my pages and do not want to change that convention. So, rather than having to re-do my entire site as .php to make this work, I’ll import the headlines shown above using good old SSI, as in:
!–#include virtual=”/includes/delicious.php” —
(You’d need a left and a right angle bracket around that, which I have left off to make the code display here.)
By coincidence, Andy Williams (ez SEO) mentioned doing this in his EzSEO Newsletter #77 last Sunday. Since Andy also explains the SEO implications and discusses how to use SSI in .html (rather than .shtml) pages (as I do), I’ll save myself the bother of explaining it and let you read Andy’s post.
If this all sounds like Greek to you, just take a deep breath and set about it methodically. It might take you a day to grasp the concepts (you don’t need to deeply understand them to use them), but at the end of that day, you’ll have a site that is easier to maintain, as well as being both more visitor friendly (more content) and more readable by SE robots, which hopefully helps your listings.
Every subsequent day after that, you reap the benefits.
To break this down into easy steps:
1. The PHP thingy needs Magpie to do it’s stuff. Don’t ask me what Magpie is or why it does, I don’t know either and I figure I don’t need to. Just get and install the the Feed2Js script. Test that with any RSS feed you have handy.
2. Grab the Kourapov version of the PHP script and plug in the location of your required Magpie file that you just installed in step one above and, your chosen RSS feed. You may want to dress up the formatting of the HTML.
3. Integrate your new .php page into your site using SSI.
Job done! Have coffee or congratulatory beverage.
As mentioned, not only can you now integrate your del.icio.us stuff (how about integrating each tag category you create into separate, dedicated pages?), you will also be able to quickly and easily integrate other RSS feeds.
(To integrate all subsequent feeds, all you need to do is to plug the feed location into the PHP file and save it with a different name. Repeat as many times as you like.)
Perhaps this one will give you the “desired motivation” - you can include a few of the latest items from Clickbank (complete with your nickname embedded), created via the ClickBank Product Feed generator by Kelvin Hui - Ambatch Systems.
Sponzurz
