Well that didn’t take long at all. If you hit www.redmonk.com now, it’ll probably look exactly the same to you, but if you look more closely you might notice that our press clippings no longer date from 2004. When we swapped over to our LAMP infrastructure from an ASP application last summer, the dynamic insertion of our latest press citations was one of a few features we had previously that got lost in the shuffle, and as many such trivial features have a habit of doing, it got forgotten (except for period reminders from James). And then I saw the del.icio.us linkroll thing this morning.
The four links that you see are pulled dynamically from del.icio.us via their Javascript interface. Some of you may point out that there have been scripts to do the same thing for ages; indeed, I used to use one of them to pull the RSS via the Magpie library, and drop it into a cache for inclusion on my blog’s homepage. But none of these operated just the way that I wanted, and allowed me to pull exactly what I wanted, taking care of caching for me. Then there’s the fact that they weren’t formatted appropriately. The del.icio.us linkroll functionality may not be original, but it does make it dead simple.
The process works like this: I tag news stories in which we’re quoted (which are themselves collected via Google News Alerts) with a specific format and a “redmonkpress” tag, and the del.icio.us feed pulls the feeds under my username that match that tag. I was playing around with this for about an hour this morning, but I’m terrible with CSS and HTML spacing, so I couldn’t get them to drop in right. I had this huge white box with scrunched up links in it plastered in the middle of our homepage. Enter Alex King – yes, THE Alex King, #104 on the Feedster 500 and one of the guys (along with Scott Sanders) behind the aggregator I expect to migrate to shortly, FeedLounge. Described the problem, and shortly thereafter its solved. Probably trivial for someone of his skills, but was driving me nuts this morning. Thanks Alex – next lunch is on me. And James, yes this does mean that the links will be updated dynamically, so you don’t have to complain about that anymore 😉
