Library Web Chic

I had a chance to skim Hacking del.icio.us this week. Overall, I’m really impressed with this book. It covers a wide range of topics which start at a beginner level and move up to more advanced topics. One of the best chapters is on del.icio.us APIs and data. It talks about some extensions and code libraries which can be used to access the del.icio.us API.

• pydelicious is a Python library for interacting with del.icio.us
• Net::Delicious is Perl module for accessing del.icio.us
• PhpDelicious is a PHP library for interacting with del.icio.us
• Rubilicious is Ruby module for accessing del.icio.us

The Tagging Hacks chapter also has some really good tricks and conventions that people often use in del.icio.us. Two interesting conventions are via: and cite: tag prefixes which users utilize to illustrate if they got a link from another del.icio.us user. Another convention that has special features is the for: tag prefix. By using the for: tag prefix along with a del.icio.us username, that bookmark is targeted for that users attention. If I understand this feature correctly it makes these bookmarks available to that user. There also is support for tagging bookmarked item using media file types. More information on this is available at http://del.icio.us/help/mediafiletypes

I’ve really only scratched the surface with my discussion of this book. I wish I had more time to talk about the books contents in depth, but really if you are interested you should get a hold of a copy. It has many good code sample and if you are looking at extending del.icio.us in any way it is a great starting point.