as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

And finally, we need to actually display links from del.icio.us on the front page. Fetch them from del.icio.us hourly and write out a document snippet, and then include that snippet in the page.

First, how to fetch them: a trivial Python script which uses the del.icio.us REST API to get recent posts:

import xmltramp,urllib2,cgi

def e(s):
  return cgi.escape(s).replace('"','"')

authinfo = urllib2.HTTPBasicAuthHandler()
authinfo.add_password('del.icio.us API', 'http://del.icio.us',
  'USERNAME','PASSWORD')
opener = urllib2.build_opener(authinfo)
urllib2.install_opener(opener)
data = urllib2.urlopen('http://del.icio.us/api/posts/recent').read()
dom = xmltramp.parse(data)

out = []
for p in dom['post':]:
  try:
    ext = p('extended')
  except:
    ext = ''
  out.append('<a href="%s" title="%s">%s</a>' % \
  (e(p('href')),e(ext),e(p('description'))))
fp = open('/var/www/kryogenix.org/scripts/index.curlies.cached','w')
fp.write('\n'.join(out))
fp.close()

Then throw a line in crontab to actually run it, with crontab -e:

@hourly python /var/www/kryogenix.org/scripts/get-delicious-recent.py

And finally a brief snippet to include it in the index page, which is a Castalian page:

<?cas
CACHED_COPY = '../scripts/index.curlies.cached'
pfp = open(CACHED_COPY)
response.write(pfp.read())
pfp.close()
?>

and that’s it. Move complete. No more maintaining my own linklog. :)

(Updated: changed the crontab call and the script so that if there’s a failure it doesn’t just blank out index.curlies.cached!)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 16th, 2005 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Howtos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.