Automated link posting - success!

[andrewducker]

I've been slowly putting the pieces in place for automated feeding of daily
posts. The latest piece worked perfectly at midday today.

It works as follows -
If you enter a posting time in the past then the post happens instantly,
with links up until that point in time.
If you put in a point in time in the future then the posting will happen
then, rather than immediately. Which means I could set up today's post
last night, and have it pop out automatically at midday today.

The next step is to include a posting frequency, so that people can choose
to make a post every n days/weeks. Shouldn't be that hard :->

Comments

[matgb]

Am I right in thinking it's auto parsing tags from delicious and makign them into tags for the post itself? That's very cool.

[andrewducker]

That is, indeed, what it's doing. As an option, of course.

[nwhyte]

Thanks for all the work you are doing on this, Andrew!

[andrewducker]

I'm actually rather enjoying it.

It's a bit sloppy at the moment - there's security stuff still to be set up, and it could do with looking nicer, and having some actual help on the screen.

But it's getting there!

[fearmeforiampink]

Aye, seconded on the thanks. Since the 'having a collection of links I can look back through/find a particular link again' is a rather distant second to 'Easily post links to my LJ', I'm very grateful for a means to do so whilst Delicious are sucking.

And look forward to when frequency appears, as then my posts won't be dependent on my (rather unreliable) memory to extract them.

[andrewducker]

Well, at least now you can set up a posting in advance, so you could set up today's now.

[fearmeforiampink]

True. And I do like the ability to post it as a private post, as that allows me to roll several days worth together, or suchlike.

[andrewducker]

You can also output to "Test" and copy the html from there.

[fearmeforiampink]

Aye. But generally I find it easy to post 'em all, then consolidate them into a single post. Makes it easier to work out if I'll need to cut it.

[andrewducker]

It's been there for a couple of days now...

[fearmeforiampink]

Aye; I've been distracted by work stuff, getting a paid job stuff, and Halloween. Been planning to do a big post of the links I've saved since my last linkpost, then set up the repeating.

[andrewducker]

The ability to pick up posts up to n days back should help with that :->

[andrewducker]

Cool - let me know if you have any problems.

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

Encouraging stuff! :D

[andrewducker]

The main thing which would get in the way of your requirements is that I'm fetching links from Pinboard via the RSS feeds, which only go back a certain distance. This seems to be 50 posts (looking here)) which is 12 days for you at the moment. If you posted more than 50 links in a week then you'd lose some off the back.

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

Just put a disclaimer on the page saying, "if you use Pinboard and bookmark more than 50 pages between posts, only 50 will display." People can look at that and then make the decision.

How difficult would it be to implement a system that posted on days of the week? Say, posted on Mondays and Thursdays?

[andrewducker]

Not that hard - it's a question of interface complexity.

An interface that says "Post every day at n o'clock" is a lot easier to understand than one that allows people to say "Post every Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, at n'oclock, unless there are less than 5 posts, in which case roll them over to the next posting."

( has a script which allows him to post whenever he has more than n posts waiting to be posted, unless it's been more than x days since the last post. I like the functionality of that too, but I do want to keep things simple.)

I'll get the basics in place first, and then work on offering more options later, if I can find ways of doing so without being too confusing.

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

As a Mac user I'm all in favour of keeping it minimal until you've established the basic functionality ;)