Web Development

Connotea To Del.icio.us

2007-01-30T22:34:57Z

I wanted to import all my Connotea bookmarks into my Del.icio.us account for a small experiment I was running. So I glued together the two APIs with a simple Ruby script.

The script uses the Ridiculous wrapper for the Del.icio.us API and my own www-connotea-ruby for the Connotea Web API.

I had problems installing Ridiculous from Rubygems, so I pulled it down from the SVN repository

    $ svn co svn://rubyforge.org//var/svn/ridiculous/0.5

I had to patch ridiculous.rb with this.

I downloaded www-connotea-ruby and extracted it

    $ tar xvzf www-connotea-ruby-0.1.tar.gz

And the connecting glue was just a few lines:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

# contodel.rb
# by Ben Lund, Jan 2007

# Usage: ruby contodel.rb connotea_username:connotea_password delicious_username:delicious_password

require '0.5/ridiculous'
require 'www-connotea-ruby-0.1/lib/www/connotea'

c_user, c_pass = *ARGV.shift.split(/:/)
Ridiculous::USERNAME, Ridiculous::PASSWORD = *ARGV.shift.split(/:/)

c = WWW::Connotea.new(:user => c_user, :password => c_pass)

c.posts_for(:user=> c_user) do |p|
  success = false
  begin
    success = Ridiculous::Post.new.add(
      :url => p.link,
      :description => p.title || p.link,
      :extended => p.description,
        # Convert multi-word tags to underscore-separated
        # And convert all to lowercase to overcome case-insensitivity 
  
      :tags => p.tags.map{|t| t.gsub(/\s+/, '_').downcase }.join(' ') )
  end
  raise "Couldn't post #{p.link}" unless success

  #give the del.icio.us server a rest
  sleep(1)
end

Update: Via Stew, a script to go back the other way from Konstantin Baierer.

An Online Reference Shelf Using Del.icio.us and Firefox

2007-02-10T14:08:56Z

While I'm doing my freelance and hobby work, I need to have certain reference materials close at hand. Of course, I've got my various O'Reilly and Pragmatic Programmers books on my bookshelf, but what do I do about those indispensable online resources?

Browser bookmarks, of course, are the answer. But I keep my bookmarks online, and it's a hassle, not to mention at least three clicks and page-loads, to get to the source via the online bookmarking service.

Happily, an answer is at hand using a combination of Del.icio.us tags, RSS, and Firefox Live Bookmarks. Here's what I do:

Any web page that I want to appear in my online reference shelf, I tag with refshelf.
I subscribe to the RSS feed for this tag using Firefox.
- To do this, you start on your refshelf tag page
- click on the orange RSS icon in the browser's address bar
- select "Subscribe to your user name's bookmarks tagged 'refshelf'"
- select "Live Bookmarks" from the drop-down list
- and click subscribe.

I chose to put the subscription in my Bookmarks Toolbar Folder, which gives me access to any of the items in two clicks and one page-load:

Of course, being an RSS feed, this list is automatically updated to contain anything I tag with "refshelf" on Del.icio.us.

I originally tried this experiment using Connotea. However, the Connotea RSS feeds don't link directly to the source, but rather to a page on Connotea about your bookmark, which itself links to the source. So I copied my bookmarks across to Del.icio.us for this experiment. I have no-one but myself to blame for this, since it was me who made that particularly stupid design decision, back in a former life...

There is one advantage to using Connotea instead, which is that you can easily get past the restriction on the number of items that are given in an RSS feed by adding a ?num=50 (or whatever) to the RSS feed URL. However, I like to keep my refshelf focused on just the essentials, so I haven't hit the limit yet on Del.icio.us.

The Breakfast Menu of Programming Languages

2007-03-11T15:59:33Z

You wake up in the morning and you decide to build a Web Application. But that is just the beginning of a difficult decision -- what language are you going to use?

You wake up in the morning and decide to have toast for breakfast. But that's not all you have to decide, it's even more important to decide what you should spread on your toast.

Chocolate Spread / PHP : It's nice and easy, but it's not really proper food, is it?
Strawberry Jam / Java : It all fruit! That's got to be good for you, right? But the seeds are gonna get in your teeth, and the sugar is going to rot them...
Chunky Peanut Butter / Perl : It looks like you've spread vomit over your toast, but, mmm-mmm, it tastes nice.
Marmite / Lisp : You either love it or you hate it.
Vegemite / Scheme : A slightly more palatable version of Marmite, but it's really hard to find in stores.
Peanut Butter with Jam / Ruby : Sounds crazy. That's for kids, right? And talk about taking ages to spread. But argue all you like -- once you've tasted it, you'll believe in it...