Month: February 2007

Three days after building a little bit of code to publish posts from this blog directly to del.icio.us, I still haven’t got every post on there. Despite following the “don’t hammer our server” guidelines and waiting over a second between API calls, my process is still being kicked off after about 20 posts and can’t get back on for a good half hour or so.

Any concrete information about what can and can’t be done at what frequencies with this lame API would be good to see as it’s something that may be useful to integrate a client’s site with but is too flaky to think about using commercially at the moment.

The del.icio.us API

I’ve been playing around with getting my blog to automatically post to del.icio.us when a new post is added (just because I can) and it’s actually very easy to talk to the del.icio.us API. To get any communication going, just create a WebRequest, add authentication, and away you go. The bit of code below reads an XML document of all posts into a string:

HttpWebRequest myReq = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(“https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all”);
myReq.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(username,password);//Both as strings
HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)myReq.GetResponse();
myReq.UserAgent = “K-blog del.icio.us adder”;//Optional
Stream receiveStream = response.GetResponseStream();
StreamReader readStream = new StreamReader (receiveStream, System.Text.Encoding.UTF8);
string deliciousResponse = readStream.ReadToEnd();
readStream.Close();
receiveStream.Close();
response.Close();

And now all my blog posts are linked on del.icio.us. There are a few problems linked with having to use the API sparingly (otherwise they start sending 503 headers back) so you can’t post too much at once, but it works as well as it’s going to.

I was pointed towards Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags by Clay Shirky and decided to read a few more posts. This one about the semantic web is interesting too. I particularly like this section on proposed uses for the semantic web:

“This example sets the pattern for descriptions of the Semantic Web. First, take some well-known problem. Next, misconstrue it so that the hard part is made to seem trivial and the trivial part hard. Finally, congratulate yourself for solving the trivial part.”

This quote could apply to a lot of issues programmers are presented with. Also this:

“the Semantic Web is divided between two goals, one good but unnecessary, the other audacious but doomed.”

The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview

This article entitled Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags is interesting for any programmer who’s had a client say they want a taggable/searchable/categorisable system of some kind. They’re all the rage at the moment, apparently. The interesting ideas reall start in the mind reading section.

“One of the biggest problems with categorizing things in advance is that it forces the categorizers to take on two jobs that have historically been quite hard: mind reading, and fortune telling.”

Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags