note: to those reading this on my wordpress blog, i cross post between here and blogger since i cannot pull the trigger on switching. i decided to cross post this here as well, even though it does not apply to wordpress.com. 

Del.icio.us is one of my favorite tools on the internet. Other than Bloglines, no other service has helped me organize and manage the information I come across on the 'net as simply and efficiently, and the linkroll feature has allowed me to provide an easy way of providing dynamic content to my blog. One of the other features that I was aware of, but had never gotten around to using, was the 'daily blog posting' feature. Essentially, the feature allowed you to put information regarding your blog login and site URL into a form and have del.icio.us do a daily post to your blog at whatever time you specified.

I finally got around to trying the service over the weekend, only to find several road blocks in my way. First, I find that I evidently cannot specify tags or tag bundles to post, meaning that anything I marked would be posted, rather than just items with a specific tag as I do when marking items for my linkroll. Second, and most important, the daily blog posting service does not play well with the Blogger API and requires some massaging to make it work, if it even can be made to work.

So I spent a couple of hours doing research on the web, trying to find a solution to this most pressing of problems. After reading several possible methods, I mixed several ideas together, mostly relying on this idea from tech.life.blogged, and came up with a rather (read:very) convoluted way of accomplishing what I wanted, which is to do a blog posting of certain tags everyday. It isn't perfect, and may/will require some supervision and editing on your part, but it was the closest I could come to a solution.

To accomplish this, first you need these three things:

1. A del.icio.us account, naturally, with either the Firefox Extension installed or the bookmarklet marked for easy marking of pages. You don't have to have these last two really, but it makes it so much simpler.


2. A FeedBurner account


3. A disposable GMail account; one that you don't mind being posted on your blog if you decide to Auto-Publish. I use the e-mail address I set up for this blog, the one linked over on the sidebar. Remember, if you set this up to Auto-Publish, the email address you use will be posted to your blog in the body of the messsage as an unsubscribe link.

Now, follow these steps to set up the posting.

1. Go to FeedBurner and enter a RSS feed in the box. You need one that you know will not be used, so I recommend using the RSS feed of a del.icio.us tag that you will never use. For example, http://del.icio.us/rss/your_username/phantasmagoricalishness, that way it shows as being a valid feed but will never get updated and send unwanted information.


2. Complete the process of "burning" your feed in FeedBurner. None of the information other than the feed is important, so you can accept the defaults provided by FeedBurner. When you are done, click on the "Optimize" tab and then click on the "Link Splicer" button about halfway down. Del.icio.us should be selected by default, if not then select it, and enter your username and the tag you want to use to filter what gets posted, for example yourusername/tagyouwanttopost. I believe you can use tag bundles as well, but I haven't tried it, for example yourusername/tagyouwanttopost+butnotunlessithasthistagtoo. Select "As a once-a-day summary only" from the drop down menu and hit save. This pushes items from your del.icio.us account into the non-existent feed you entered earlier. If you would like you can choose "View Feed" to see what your feed looks like.


3. Login to your account at Blogger, go into your blog setting and click "Email". You will see a box with you username in front and @blogger.com behind it. This is your supersekret e-mail address that you can use automatically post items to your blog. Choose something suitably long and random for your supersekret word, and enter it into the box. Put a check by "Publish" if you want Blogger to auto-publish whatever gets sent to that address. If not leave the box blank and the post will be saved as a draft, awaiting your intervention. Hit "Save Settings" and then Re-Publish your blog.


4. Go to your disposable GMail account. Remember, as mentioned above, this address will posted as part of an unsubscribe link, so don't use an address you wish to keep private. Click Settings > Filters > Create a new filter. In the box labeled "To", enter something like this, yourgmailaddress+RSS@gmail.com. GMail ignores everything after the plus sign, providing this QD way of creating a disposable email address as well as a way of easily sorting inbound email. Click "Next Step". Put a check beside "Forward it to" and enter the Mail-To-Blogger address you created in the previous step. You can change any of the other settings you wish to and archive the message or apply a tag. Click "Save Filter".


5. Go to RssFwd. Grab the location of your created feed from FeedBurner and copy-paste it into the box and hit "Submit", then enter the Gmail address you will be using, e.g. yourgmailaddress+RSS@gmail.com, under "Email" and click subscribe. Go to GMail and click the link to subscribe.

And that should be all you have to do. At about 12:00am or so every night, a listing of the things you marked in del.ico.us and tagged appropriately should show up, along with whatever descriptions you have entered, as a post on your blog or as a draft in your "Posting" tab. Whether you choose to Auto-Publish or not, it is a good idea to edit the unsubscribe links and everything below the line when you get an opportunity, since anyone can theoretically click on the link and unsubscribe you from the email feed. My personal preference is to leave the Publish box unchecked; then I go in and edit the post in the morning and hit Publish. Not as automatic as I would like, but I have not found a better way, as of yet. I tried using the "Summary Burner" feature to insert the "#end" tag at the bottom of every post that Blogger uses to determine the end of the e-mailed post, but I was unable to get that to work.

If anyone knows of any easier way to do this, or knows of other services that could be used in place of the ones I have listed here, feel free to drop me a comment or a email and let me know.