Posting links from delicious to Blogger


I collect quite a long list of links while I “surf the web”. Until now I’ve done the Mixed Links series, but I’ve been looking for ways to automate it.

Enter delicious (or del.icio.us as it was formerly known): it has a nice Firefox plugin and theoretically it can post your bookmarks automatically to your blog. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to work with Blogger :-(. (an other qualm of mine with delicious is that – even though it was bought by Yahoo several years back, user accounts weren’t migrated, so there is yet another account to create – no OpenID). I found a workaround to the problem here: Post Delicious Bookmarks to Your Blog. The basic steps are:

  1. “Burn” your delicious feed with Feedburner (given that both Blogger and Feedburner are owned by Google, you already have an account for both).
  2. Enable email subscriptions to your feed (Publicize -> Email subscriptions). If you keep getting errors while you try to do this, go into your Gmail account and perform some cleanup – it seems that if you have an inactive Gmail account, you will get errors).
  3. Enable email posting on your blog (Blogger dashboard -> Settings -> Email & Mobile). Make sure that you use a complex email address and that you check the “Save emails as draft posts” option.
  4. Now subscribe with your blogger address to the feed! You should get a confirmation email (which will appear as a draft post). Click on the link in it and delete the post. That’s it! In 24 hours you should start to see the new bookmarks appearing.

One problem with this approach is that you will get the entire header/footer with every post. Besides being annoying, this exposes the unsubscribe link, which means that arbitrary visitors can unsubscribe your address, thus breaking the process! I’ve put together the following bookmarklet: Delicious format! When you have a delicious draft, edit the post and use this bookmarklet. It will remove the header and footer. Additionally it will try to convert links which it detects into proper anchor tags.

Update: added support for entries which contain only one bookmark (they don’t have the initial list of elements).

Update: Changed the bookmarklet again, to adapt to the changing email format…

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2 responses to “Posting links from delicious to Blogger”

  1. i would think with your mastery of yahoo pipes you'd have figured out a way to filter out the footer information that contains your unsubscribe link.

  2. 🙂

    Unfortunately the adding of the headers/footers happens at the moment when the email is being sent (they are not part of the actual feed), so there isn't much I could have done with Yahoo Pipes.

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