Automatic redirection for del.icio.us 10th of August, 2006 POST·MERIDIEM 02:16

If you, like me, have often thought to yourself “bah, loading del.icio.us and clicking on the first link for a given tag combination is taking six seconds longer and 150% more attention than I’d like”, you’ll have realised that setting up automatic 302 redirection is not really an option for them, since automatic redirectors have become a tool for spammers to disguise dodgy URIs, and the service has open signups; there’s nothing to stop spammers abusing their accounts.

However, it is not trivially possible for a spammer to abuse my  del.icio.us account: that’s what the password is there for. So I’ve implemented automatic redirection based on tags for a single account, reading the data from an index made of a daily backup. http://​www.​parhasard.​net/​b/​dwb will redirect to the newest entry under del.icio.us/aidan with the tag DWB(in this case, the search page of the Grimms’ etymological dictionary at Universität Trier; note that in this implementation, ASCII in tags is case-insensitive, non-ASCII is case-sensitive); http://​www.​parhasard.​net/​b/​greek+language+καθαρεύουσα gives a synopsis of the current language situation in Greece, and so on.

To do this for your own del.icio.us account, you need shell access to a web server, several Perl modules, and DB4 support in PHP. To check for the Perl modules on the server, run this one-liner from a shell:

perl -e 'use DB_File; use Date::Parse; use Encode; use File::Temp; use HTTP::Request; use LWP::UserAgent; use XML::Parser'

echo '<?php dba_open("/tmp/my-db-test", "c", "db4"); ?>' | php

Source code for the backup script (which you need to create the index of tag => URI mappings) is here; source code for the redirect script is here. There are a few constants at the top of each file which you’ll need to modify; those with the same name need to be identical in the two files. You’ll also need to add a crontab(5) entry to keep the backup up-to-date; mine looks like:

23 5 * cd /www/parhasard.net/www/ && ./backup-del.icio.us.pl

If your web server allows it, try adding the line AcceptPathInfo On to your .htaccess; without it, you’ll need to say http://​server-address/​b.​php?query=tag1+tag2+tag3 , which is much less comfortable.

Word of the day: inminente is Spanish for “imminent”; I love that the language community is scrupulously regularising enough that they abandoned the Latin orthographic change of <inm> -> <imm>.