You may have noticed that my bookmarks blog is now not used for storing my bookmarks. Instead I'm using del.icio.us which is a social bookmarking service. Anyway, until recently the section in cubicgarden titled my latest bookmarks was still pointing at the old bookmark blog but through the del.icio.us REST API. I was able to extract my latest bookmarks using http://del.icio.us/api/posts/recent. Pull that into Apache Cocoon then do a XSL transformation to create the simple HTML include which Blojsom then called in using its Import tool plugin. Why do i need to use cocoon? Well the results from a REST interface are usually in xml and you need to transform it into html if you want to display it on a webpage. I could have found some way of doing it using Velocity, but why bother when cocoon does such a good job. It also cache's the request and supports http authentication. Making the two step process easy as pie. You can play with the cocoon pipeline which generates the reults by changing the number of entries on the end. http://adrenalin-online.demon.co.uk/cocoon/delicious/5 – will only get 5 of the latest entries. I also thought about doing the same using a RSS to html xsl transform, but why bother when the REST API is already there for you to use. Honestly I've only scratched the surface and theres lots more to play with. But for now this is good…
