Tag Archives: delicious

Setting up del.icio.us blog posting on blogs.sun.com

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Recently I have received a number of emails about del.icio.us blog posting “links for” working with blogs.sun.com (BSC) or rather not as the case may be, as they have all vented frustration about it not working (either well or at all).

Dave Johnson, the man behind Roller Weblogger itself (the platform BSC runs over), suggests alternative approaches to achieving the same result, most notably using a standalone tool described in “delicious.com Blog Posting tool“.

I was similarly frustrated having just configured the delicious blog posting tool (and getting it to work), however I have since found that the issues I faced were due to not reconfiguring my XML-RPC password after the recent upgrade to the external Identity authentication and authorisation security mechanism used to access BSC.

To get it to work again I had to reconfigure both my BSC and del.icio.us accounts.

Setting up your BSC account for del.icio.us blog posting

First off I had to go into the “Your Profile” page in my BSC account.

Then I had to configure a “Web Client API Password”, as in the screen grab below.

Setting up your del.icio.us account for del.icio.us blog posting

After reconfiguring my BSC account I had to change the user name and password combination in the del.icio.us blog posting settings page.

The user name now needs to be set-up as your email address (and not the old style BSC user name, which matched your blog ‘handle’), whilst the password needs to be configured as the same as the “Web Client API Password” above, see the following graphic for more detail.

Another item to note is that “blog_out_id” needs to be set as your BSC ‘handle’, whilst I’ve found “out_cat_id” has little effect (as the posts default to whatever “Category for posts received via clients” is set to in your BSC blog preferences).

Remember to set “Enable weblog client support?” in your BSC blog preferences to get any of this this to work in the first place.

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Since reconfiguring the two accounts above it’s been working consistantly and I feel safe enough to blog about it as a way forward.

I originally found out about setting up del.icio.us blog posting from the blog post “Posting from del.icio.us to Roller” from Lars Trieloff’s Collaboration Weblog. This worked fine until the change to access was implemented at BSC, and would presume it’s advice still holds for the majority of cases (outside of BSC).

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What do Facebook, del.icio.us, and last.fm, all have in common this month?

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Yes, that’s right; they are all suffering from functionality issues due to design flaws introduced in their last look and feel upgrades.

Looks like this is the month for it, because in rapid succession we’ve seen changes at all three of these web2.0 stalwarts.

So how have these changes effected functionality, and what’s the real problem at hand ?

  1. Facebook
    If your a Facebook user then you will have noticed the option to use ‘new’ facebook, which, although keeps the quite fixed layout (and color theme), moves applications onto a seperate ‘page’ (or tab rather, although it behaves as a page).
    The major problem with this is settings between the new and old Facebook layouts don’t appear to be compatible, which points to access control being about the UI and not about the data itself.
  2. del.icio.us
    So del.icio.us have introduced a ‘richer’ look and feel, but appear to have lost some of their elegant simplicity. A shame, because for a service like del.icio.us I’d rather have function over form.
  3. last.fm
    Similar to the issue with del.icio.us, but in this case their is a huge user community hankering for backwards compatibility with the old look and feel, who want a similar ability to the recent Facebook refresh in being able to ‘swap’ between the two UI designs.
    Perhaps this isn’t such a good idea, because like the current Facebook issues, who’s to know what settings and access controls are locked into the UI and not the user data.

Along with the recent problems at Twitter around “outbound SMS messages” it’s turning out to be quite the month…