del.icio.us proxy v1

April 2, 2008: version 1.1 released.

A little while back, Ian Lloyd mentioned that he could not save links to del.icio.us because the site is blocked at his workplace. So, I wrote a proxy using PHP.

What does it do?

The proxy allows you to save bookmarks to your del.icio.us account without going to the del.icio.us site itself.

So, why is that useful? Say you’re at work and your friendly IT department have decided that de.icio.us is an evil distraction and must be blocked to save the company from going under. You still want to save bookmarks to your del.icio.us account and this is where the proxy comes in.

Once installed, the proxy sits somewhere on your own website – which is hopefully not blocked as well – and waits patiently for you to send it a bookmark. It will save the bookmark to your del.icio.us account for you using an interface kindly provided by the folks at del.icio.us (their API).

So, the proxy saves your bookmarks to your del.icio.us account by proxy, hence its name. Obviously, the del.icio.us service must be available in order to use the proxy.

Download and install

Download del.icio.us proxy

That link also takes you to the installation instructions. The proxy is fairly easy to install, even for people with little PHP knowledge. You just set a few things and upload it to an area of your site.

Once installed, it’s a cinch to use. It’s not been tested extensively in the wild yet, so consider this version a beta release. Having said that, Ian says he’s been using it for a little while with no problems, so I figured I’d finally release it for others to use.

I hope people find it helpful. Enjoy!

Notes

After some initial theatrics with throttling, writing a proxy was quite straightforward. To begin with it seemed that, despite sticking to the API rules about not querying the server too often, querying del.icio.us from my domain had been permanently blocked.

Having discussed my intent and my code with the friendly del.icio.us support team, I’m assured that this shouldn’t be a problem. However, thanks to a tweet from Shiflett, I coded in some extra protection against being throttled.

If you do get throttled by del.icio.us while using the proxy, I suggest you get in touch with del.icio.us directly to sort it out quickly.

Thanks

The proxy uses the PhpDelicious library written by the lovely Ed Eliot. Thanks Ed.

The idea to check for the del.icio.us account’s last update time before posting to it came from Chris Shiflett. Ta Chris.

The inspiration for the proxy in the first place came from Ian Lloyd. Cheers, m’dear.

Updates

April 2, 2008

Version 1.1 released with important fixes.

December 6, 2007

Version 1.0.1 released with annoyance fixes.