I spent some time today looking at the de.licio.us API and writing bits of php with SimpleXML. Both of them are very easy and clear to use. I tried a bunch of the examples in the de.licio.us api docs to think through what it was possible to do with the queries. I really like de.licio.us, and hope it… well, hope that it stays pure. It’s so nice and clean, it makes sense, it’s not all crapped up with junk all over the page or the interface. Maybe a little more since the redesign, but it was fairly restrained.
This article by Matt Biddulph shows how to do some interesting stuff with de.licio.us data using Python, libxml2, tagsoup, and the Redland RDF toolkit. Backing Up Delicious with PHP, mySQL, SimpleXML, and Ajax also looked like fun to try. That was all way too fancy for what I needed to do today, but I’m keeping it in mind for future tool-building or experimenting with my personal del.icio.us account.
I had an annoying and frustrating interlude of realizing I needed to download xcode onto my new hard drive, downloading it for like 2 hours, going off in the meantime to 2 other machines I have accounts on to see if I could do what I wanted there while waiting for xcode, doing half of it (had php5, did not have other stuff I needed!), realizing slowly that I was in an endless labyrinth of nowhere quite having all the tools or access that I needed, and going back to my laptop in disgust. Also, I’m on a Mac and out of sync with the several different linux servers I have accounts on, so am always switching environments and remembering things that need to be tweaked.
I wonder how much time other people spend fiddling with their development environment? Or having to set it all up again after some crash or computer loss? I’ve noticed that even the holiest sounding super-experienced people who act like they’re perfect about these things still spend a good amount of time saying “Oh, wait…” as they flail around, hit dead ends, and so on. That makes me feel a bit better about what happened today, when my stupid xcode download finally finished, wouldn’t install, puzzled me for another frustrating 20 minutes until I realized my laptop was running an older operating system than it was before my HD crash. Ran around looking for CDs to upgrade. Failed to find them. Dammit! Downloaded older version of xcode. Now everything works! Tomorrow I will make the php all nice and make it do what I want… then stuff it all into a Drupal module.
I can’t remember when I first started using delicious to manage my bookmarks. I was reluctant at first to try it out, but now I can’t imagine bookmarking any other way. It integrates seamlessly with Firefox and I love being able to search my bookmarks before going to google.
I haven’t really looked at the API to see what sort of things I could do with it though.
Programs that let me save the customizations I’ve made are my favorites. I think every program should let me export a text file with my customizations and make it easy for me to import it again.
I know Avid lets me save my setup and I can back it up to a USB thumbdrive and carry it with me.