Brian Sweeting

Ever since I started using del.icio.us, I wanted to use my links as a replacement to the recent links section on my side bar, which were just Movable Type entries assigned to a “Recent Links” category. I found several ways of doing it using third-party services, but in the end decided to use a method that relied less on third-party services.

Jeffrey Veen’s tutorial on using a feed parsing service like bigbold.com’s rss digest for displaying del.icio.us links on your blog seemed like the easiest method. Phil Windley also uses this method, but uses Feedsplitter instead. I did that, but I didn’t like the fact that with each page view would result in a call to del.icio.us and bigbold.com. So instead of using bigbold.com, I opted to use MagpieRSS. This results in one less call to a third party and MagpieRSS can use caching so I don’t even have to hit del.icio.us each time if I don’t want to.

Here is the code if you’re interested:


<?php
define('MAGPIE_DIR', '/path/to/magpie/');
require_once(MAGPIE_DIR.'rss_fetch.inc');
$num_items = 10;
$url = "http://del.icio.us/rss/sweeting";
$rss = @fetch_rss( $url );
if($rss) {
   $items = array_slice($rss->items, 0, $num_items);
   echo "<ul>";
   foreach ($items as $item) {
      $href = $item['link'];
      $title = htmlentities($item['title']);
      $description = htmlentities($item['description']);
      echo "<li><a href="$href" title="$description">$title</a></li>\n";
   }
   echo "</ul>";
}
else {
   echo "<p>There was a problem fetching the latest links from <a href="http://del.icio.us/sweeting">del.icio.us</a></p>\n";
}
?>