I’ve been using del.icio.us and their slick Firefox plugin for over a year now, and they’re great. I’ve found the tools especially handy for tagging sites that I want to do something about¹, or sites that make good reference material². Unfortunately, the Del.icio.us pages are slow to load and a bit difficult to read.

Luckily, Del.icio.us provides several ways to get at your data, including RSS, JSON, a rich HTTP-API, and plain-old HTML. Today’s hack builds a simple set of cached, static pages using wget and the Delicious HTML interface.

Here’s a simple form of my caching script:

TAGS="todo readme postme watchme eatme buyme"

for tag in $TAGS; do

    mkdir -p $tag   
    wget -O$tag/$TAGS_OUT \
    "http://del.icio.us/html/madmaxx/$tag?count=5000&rssbutton=no&tags=no"

done

The full version of the script also generates a summary of the tags, and copies template pages to each of the tag folders for styling. The simple, finished site does most of what I wanted it to, now I only need to spend some more time styling the lists so they’re easier to read.

Total hack time: 15 minutes.

1. With tags like readme, todo, postme ↩
2. Like sites with great layouts or inspiring artwork ↩

More delicious than del.icio.us? An interesting extension of the uber bookmarking concept. I’ll have to try this one.

On Being and Deliciousness, with Wil Shipley, a compelling interview with the recently-sacked CEO of the Omni Group.

del.icio.us direc.tor
del.icio.us direc.tor is a prototype for an alternative web-based rich UI for del.icio.us. It leverages the XML and XSL services of modern browsers to deliver a responsive interface for managing user accounts with a large number of records.