The previous post on this blog was the first published automatically from Technology Evangelist's del.icio.us bookmarks. Del.icio.us is a web based bookmarking program that allows you to bookmark and share bookmarked sites on their platform. Sites are ranked based on how often people bookmark them, creating a unique metric different from that used by search engines that rely more on link popularity. Yahoo purchased del.icio.us in December but hasn't made any noticeable changes to the service yet.

Del.icio.us has a feature called "daily blog posting" that will automatically publish to your blog a digest of sites you've bookmarked over the past day. Once set up, the service works great, but the instructions are very limited on the del.icio.us site. Here's what worked for us for our blog powered by Movable Type:

1. Set up a del.icio.us account (if you haven't already).
2. Bookmark some sites (if you haven't already).
3. Click Settings > daily blog post.
4. Fill out the Thingy form (yes, they call it a Thingy).

job_name: You can use anything for this field. It isn't publicly published

out_name: Use your blog's user name.

out_pass: Use your blog's password. Note: Movable Type blogs using the 3.2 platform (and probably future versions) need to use your API Password for this field. Find (or create) your API password by logging in, then clicking on your user name along the top of the screen. Scroll to the bottom or that page to find your API password.

out_url:This is the location of your mt-xmlrpc.cgi file. A likely location is: http://www.yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/mt-xmlrpc.cgi

out_time: This is the hour (integer) of the day in military time you'd like your del.icio.us links to be published. Keep in mind that this is GMT, so if you're in the United States, subtract 5-8 hours to find the appropriate time. For example, if you'd like your del.icio.us links to go live at midnight, 5, 6, 7 or 8 will probably get it right. Something in the 20's would work for end of work day posting.

out_blog_id: This is the ID number of your blog. In most cases, it will be 1. However, if you created a test blog before creating your first blog, or have more than one blog running on Movable Type, it may be 2, 3, etc. To find your blog's ID, click Main Menu at the top of the page, then Mouse over the name of the blog you'd like to publish your del.icio.us bookmarks to. Your status bar should show something like this: http://www.yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/mt.cgi?__mode=menu&blog_id=2 In this case, the blog ID is 2.

out_cat_id: What category do you want to publish your del.icio.us links to? We publish our links to a category called . . . links. So, what's the category ID? Click Categories in the left menu, create a new category for your links if one doesn't already exist, then click on the category link. The URL should look something like this:
http://www.yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/mt.cgi?__mode=view&_type=category&blog_id=2&id=97 In this case, the category ID is 97.

Click "Submit Query"

Done. Now you just have to wait for your out_time to pass. But keep in mind that del.icio.us isn't always on time, so don't freak out if your del.icio.us links don't go live at your out_time:01.

By the way, the black and blue checkered icon at the bottom is this post is a link to bookmark this post to del.icio.us. If you found this post valuable consider bookmarking it by clicking that link.