I'll soon have far less free time that I have now, so I'm actively working on simplifying my life. I don't want to give up things, I try to slipstream as much as possible. So far I think I'm doing quite well.
One big time waster was putting together Sunday's regular weekly links. I bookmark stuff I find on excellent delicious using Delicious Firefox buttons. That part is fast and painless, there is nothing I can do to improve that. When creating a post, I basically copy/paste, cleanup and then some formatting. Booooring...
As I grew tired of that, I remembered than delicious has an API that I could use to automate formatting. If I would be just little bit more careful when posting, Sunday evening could be free again. I could use first tag as category, enter a description, so post generation could be completely automatic.
And that's how DeliciousLinks project was born few weeks ago. Since some stuff is hard-coded, the executable is not ready for publishing. But if anyone thinks this could be useful, I'll gladly share the code.
Let's go to some C# code how I done it.... Prepare WebClient object with right credentials.
WebClient webClientDelicious = new WebClient
{
Encoding = Encoding.Default,
Credentials = new NetworkCredential(username, password)
};
Get XML of links from particular day. I'll repeat that for all dates in a week.
Uri uriDelicious = new Uri(string.Format("https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/get?&dt={0:yyyy-MM-dd}", date));
string xmlContent = webClientDelicious.DownloadString(uriDelicious);
Then, using Linq to XML, I sort results and fill data in List<Link>
var posts = from post in xdoc.Descendants("post")
orderby post.Attribute("tag").Value.Split(' ')[0], post.Attribute("description").Value
select new Link
{
Url = post.Attribute("href").Value,
Title = post.Attribute("description").Value,
Description = post.Attribute("extended") == null ? "" : post.Attribute("extended").Value,
Category = (post.Attribute("tag").Value.Split(' ')[0]).Capitalize()
};
I also parse a RSS feed, I also parse that with Linq to XML.
var entries = from feedElements in rssXDocument.Descendants(xmlns + "entry")
select new Link
{
Url = feedElements.Elements(xmlns + "link")
.Where(link => link.Attribute("rel").Value == "alternate")
.Select(link => link.Attribute("href").Value).First(),
Title = feedElements.Element(xmlns + "title").Value,
Description = "",
Category = "Software Updates"
};
Then I'll just roll over results, use StringBuilder to build HTML and post body is done.
But where to put this code into? In Windows Live Writer add-in, of course!
First, I add a reference to WindowsLive.Writer.Api. Then I'll create new class that will extend ContentSource.
[WriterPlugin("{06BDBEB7-0D4F-45bf-AD23-2AAE6D98D745}", "Delicious Links",
ImagePath = "images.delicious_links.png",
HasEditableOptions = true,
PublisherUrl = "http://vidmar.net/",
Description = "Helps to generate link posts using bookmarks on del.icio.us.")]
[InsertableContentSource("Delicious Links")]
public class WlwPlugin : ContentSource
{
Settings settings;
public override DialogResult CreateContent(IWin32Window dialogOwner, ref string content)
{
DialogResult dialogResult;
using (MainForm mainForm = new MainForm(settings.Username, settings.Password))
{
dialogResult = mainForm.ShowDialog();
if (dialogResult == DialogResult.OK)
content = mainForm.Links;
mainForm.Hide();
}
return dialogResult;
}
// ... some more boring code to read and write settings ...
}
All done! I can get my weekly links post with couple of clicks exactly where I need them. I love it.
This is how my Windows Live Writer looks like now.
