Delicious is one of the biggest social bookmarking services. It provides powerful functions to syndicate information from service in form of RSS feeds. Unfortunately they overdid it with feed internals and in current state it sucks.
Fortunately it can be fixed and I did just that with simple Yahoo Pipe.
Delicious tag feeds
Delicious provides two types of tag feeds:
- popular;
- recent.
If narrowed down to specific topic there are not much bookmarks that get popular so recent feed is more active and interesting.
guid problem
I had subscribed to portable tag and very soon (after umpteenth link to Portable operating systems on Lifehacker) I had noticed that instead of recent links feed serves recent bookmarks literally. Every person adding any link (no matter if it is present on delicious already) with that tag gets in feed.
Looking into it showed that Delicious is using some kind of unique identifier as guid (you can refresh your knowledge about guid with my post on RSS internals ), tied to user who made bookmark.
Yahoo Pipe fix
So I made simple pipe that filters duplicate stories from feed and reassigns real link as guid. There will still be duplicates but your feed reader will (or at least should) correctly determine them as such and only display new items.
- Go to pipe.
- Type in tag.
- Run pipe.
- Get as RSS.
Link http://pipes.yahoo.com/rarst/delicioustag
Do you use RSS to track interesting keywords? Share you favorite method in comments. :)
Jonny #
Yahoo pipes are such a great idea. However, this is far too clever for me Rarst, I have been subscribed to this feed for ages as I wouldn’t have the patience to make my own:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=GGZDQ1e32xGMXWKzXqIxGw
It’s a mashup of several services like digg and reddit etc.
Is there no way of doing this with google alerts perhaps?
Rarst #
@Jonny
Doing what? Filter Delicious? I already did all of work, you only need to use pipe linked in post. :)
http://pipes.yahoo.com/rarst/delicioustag
Jonny #
Sorry, I mean to make my own feeds using yahoo pipes looks a little tricky for me. There are many catagories I’d like to follow on a a few websites such as digg etc but I use the one I mentioned as it would take me a while to make one myself. Didn’t really make myself very clear. Very creative post though Rarst! I was just offering google alerts as an alternative to Rss. :)
Rarst #
@Jonny
Just read pipes docs and try to play with them. :) As long as you don’t try to do complex things (like processing 17000 links – that’s slow, lol) it’s relatively easy.
Otherwise just subscribe to bunch of feeds in good client (like FeedDemon) and set keyword monitoring for what interests you.
Some people like pre-made agregators such as http://popurls.com/ I just prefer custom solutions.
Really, RSS is soooo flexible, that’s why I like it so much. :)
Google alerts are nice but kinda unstable. I got alert today for myself (yeah, vanity monitoring) from page five years (!) old. :)
Jonny #
Thanks for the tips, I use netvibes.com for rss but really should look at a proper app. Not sure if netvibes does keyword monitoring I need to look into it. :)
Chris Mear #
Thanks for this pipe — exactly what I was about to go and build myself, and you’ve saved me the effort!
Rarst #
@Chris Mear
You are welcome. :)
Just be sure to check if everything works properly, quite old pipe – there were some changes at Yahoo Pipes since and might have been changes at Delicious as well.
ocarbone #
Unfortunately it does not work.
http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/tag/{tag} is now empty :(
Rarst #
@ocarbone
I think delicious changed completely (like in owner and site itself) since this post was written… I had actually stopped using it as well (not much point for my taste) so no idea if this can be done again in current version.