Something I miss

The following is suffused with my own technological cluelessness, and is mostly an effort to articulate a problem and perhaps generate steps toward a solution.

We’ve all had the experience of rug-pulled-from-beneath with software or utilities or apps, and whenever a favorite is acquired by one of the big kids (Google, Yahoo, etc.) we know it’s just a matter of time until our hearts will be broken again (Google Reader, anyone?). The one I miss most is Delicious, which produced an RSS feed that I could pipe directly to my blog, such that items I’d collected via Delicious (via a menu-bar bookmarklet) would show up as blog entries, thus logging the spoor of my wanderings. It was easy. Yahoo bought Delicious in 2005, did nothing with it, then sold it a couple of years ago. Because the browser extension was broken with the sale, I’ve scarcely used Delicious for the last couple of years, and Zotero has been my tool of choice for KFTF… but I’ve used Zotero only on my desktop machine, and haven’t (until now) explored the possibility of piping my saved items to my blog. The new beginning with WordPress might embolden me to experiment anew.

So here’s what I’d LIKE to be able to do:

  • Implement RSS delivery of bookmarked items from Delicious AND Zotero AND Evernote as blog postings, WITH whatever tagging or enfolderation I’ve provided
  • Retroactively INSERT bookmarked items into the WordPress blog archive, by date of addition (dream on…)
  • profit

I did manage to EXPORT my Delicious links as an html file…

and there’s a fetch_feed tag and/or ‘RSSin Page’ plugin that might solve the problem for Zotero

Evernote seems to have abruptly abandoned RSS (“At this point, the feature was imposing excessive load on the service relative to its use and utility, and the decision was made to remove it…”)… and this just in: “We have replaced the RSS feed with our new Reminders “Daily Digest” feature…”.

And I’d add in my LibraryThing RSS feed too, if I could figure out how.

So I know more about the issue and the possibilities than I did a couple of hours ago, and I hope for Deus ex Machina but doubt me an it will be forthcoming.

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