Using Ecto’s Script Feature to Post Your Delicious Links

I was looking for an easy way to post links I’ve bookmarked in del.icio.us to my blog.

Not all the links – there’s no sense inundating readers of my geology blog with a bunch of recipes and quilting patterns. Just the links with a particular tag. And not every day, either – I don’t do enough bookmarking, or enough blogging, to justify that. Maybe some people like blogs where two out of every three posts are entitled “Links for [today's date]“, but I don’t.

So I wrote a little perl script to use with the offline blogging client Ecto. When you run the script, it pulls the 20 most recently posted links from your del.icio.us account that have been tagged with a special “blogthis” tag, formats them nicely, and dumps them into your currently open draft.

It’s only semi-automatic – you still have to manually delete any links you’ve already posted, and add titles, extra formatting, etc. – but it gets the job done.

Installation

  1. If necessary, download and install Net::Delicious (try typing cpan -i Net::Delicious from the command line).
  2. Download the script: delicious.txt
  3. Edit the script so it has your del.icio.us username/password and the del.icio.us tag that you’re using to mean “post this to my blog”.
  4. Save your edited script as “delicious.pl” in Ecto’s script folder (~/Library/Application Support/ecto3/scripts). The .pl extension is important.
  5. Open Ecto. You should be able to run the script from Tools > Scripts.

Post a Comment

Your email is never published nor shared. Required fields are marked *

*

*