del.icio.us part 3

OK, so here's the cool stuff (which completely trumps any of the issues I mentioned in my last post).

* link rolls - http://del.icio.us/help/linkrolls
You'll find this function under "settings" (not help). At its simplest it creates a javascript string you can paste into an HTML document that will pull your links into your Web page live. That means any changes you make to your del.icio.us links will change on your page. This alone is cool enough - IMHO - for us to drop everything and start building up libraries of del.icio.us links and importing them into our subject guides.

To see any example of the sort of thing I'll describe below, see
http://library.ucsc.edu/~ldjaffe/del.html

I was really surprised that none of the examples of libraries using del.icio.us took advantage of this capability. Two just pointed to their del.icio.us site and one imported the entire tag cloud into a page. It seems you can do so much more with the link roll function AND feature it within your existing Web site that this is the way to go. No? Yes!

And, that's just the minimum. The link roll utility let's you specify which items are displayed and customize how your links will look. Some of these features aren't (well) documented, but if you look around a bit and experiment, you can figure out some easy hacks. For instance, you can specify more than one condition (additional tags) be met for inclusion of links (e.g., library+pathfinder). If you thought ahead, you could tag your links with this in mind. For instance, if you were doing a guide for a class, tag all the related links with the class number and some other feature (astro101+reference, astro+journals, etc). Then build a page that clusters those items according to relevant categories. You can easily generate four or five link roll scripts and paste them into a page to make a quick and easy guide.

The trick here is getting the links into del.icio.us. I was hoping to find a way to bulk import Web page contents directly or at least to import them into a browser's bookmarks as an intermediate step but haven't found one yet. I did use the menubar tool to add all the links from one of my guides but that was tedious. However, I think that's going to be worthwhile in the long run.

* tag rolls - http://del.icio.us/help/tagrolls
For the moment, I think these look cooler than they really are (but maybe I shouldn't underestimate the importance of looking good). These are less apparently customizable than the link rolls, but only apparently. Having generated scripts for both formats, I noticed that they shared similar syntax, which suggested that you could limit tag clouds to links with specific tags. The example we were pointed to included all the tags for all the links in a particular collection, whether or not they were relevant. Obviously you can manage that by having subject-specific collections but that rubs against the grain.

original javascript code:

script type="text/javascript" src="http://del.icio.us/feeds/js/tags/ldjaffe?icon;size=12-35;color=87ceeb-0000ff;title=my%20del.icio.us%20tags;name;showadd"

... and the hacked version (all caps)

script type="text/javascript" src="http://del.icio.us/feeds/js/tags/ldjaffe/JEWISH+LIBRARY?icon;size=12-35;color=87ceeb-0000ff;title=my%20del.icio.us%20tags;name;showadd"

So, take a look and let me know what you think. http://library.ucsc.edu/~ldjaffe/del.html