Hackery

Missing Delicious Feeds

Fri 29 May 2009

I've been playing with using delicious as a lightweight URL database lately, mostly for use by greasemonkey scripts of various kinds (e.g. squatter_redirect).

For this kind of use I really just need a lightweight anonymous http interface to the bookmarks, and delicious provides a number of nice lightweight RSS and JSON feeds suitable for this purpose.

But it turns out the feed I really need isn't currently available. I mostly want to be able to ask, "Give me the set of bookmarks stored for URL X by user Y", or even better, "Give me the set of bookmarks stored for URL X by users Y, Z, and A".

Delicious have a feed for recent bookmarks by URL:

http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/{format}/url/{url md5}

and a feed for all a user's bookmarks:

http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/{format}/{username}

and feeds for a user's bookmarks limited by tag(s):

http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/{format}/{username}/{tag[+tag+...+tag]}

but not one for a user limited by URL, or for URL limited by user.

Neither alternative approach is both feasible and reliable: searching by url will only return the most recent set of N bookmarks; and searching by user and walking the entire (potentially large) set of their bookmarks is just too slow.

So for now I'm having to workaround the problem by adding a special hostname tag to my bookmarks (e.g. squatter_redirect=www.openfusion.net), and then using the username+tag feed as a proxy for my username+domain search.

Any cluesticks out there? Any nice delicious folk want to whip up a shiny new feed for the adoring throngs? :-)