Marketing Technology Blog

Back in December, I wrote about subscribing to my post via RSS or Email and the additional benefit of getting my daily links.

Utilizing the Del.icio.us plugin for Firefox, I save and comment on links during the day and then Feedburner would tie those links into my RSS feed. Al Pasternak was kind enough to comment with some advice on how to utilize a little known feature of Del.icio.us to post my links into my blog every day. You may have noticed that I’ve been doing this the past few days!

There are a couple reasons why I think this is great:

1. 80% of my readers visiting my blog were not getting those links.
2. Links to fellow bloggers may have been pushing traffic but those bloggers didn’t realize they were coming from me. I want them to know I thought enough about their blog to tell everyone about it.

So here’s how it’s done. First you’ll need to go to your del.icio.us settings page and select “blog postings“:

You’ll then want to add a new ‘thingy’ (that’s what del.icio.us calls it!).

UPDATE 12/9/2007: I’d highly recommend that you add another user specifically for the Del.icio.us posts. Every once in a while I change my password and have broken the daily posts when I’ve done this.

1. Enter the job_name, I called mine “Links”.
2. Substitute your login for out_name.
3. Substitute your password for out_pass.
4. Enter your submission URL. For a WordPress blog, that’s http://www.yourblog.com/xmlrpc.php
5. Enter the time you want the post submitted utilizing a 24 hour clock (6AM = 06, 6PM = 18) in out_time
6. Enter out_blog_id = 1
7. Enter the category, I created a new “Daily Reads” category with a category id = 28

Here’s a screenshot:

After the query is set up and submitted, it will post that blog entry on a daily basis.

The last step was to utilize a few styles in my style sheet to modify the look and feel of the entry. (I did report a problem to del.icio.us that they are not properly closing a paragraph tag in their post, but it displays properly in any browser.)

.delicious ul, .delicious li{
list-style:none;
text-indent:0;
padding:0;
}
.delicious-link {
font-weight:bold;
}
.delicious-extended {
margin-left:25px;
}
.delicious-tags {
display:none; //I’m hiding this
}

Voila! Thanks, Al!