How can I publish links to press coverage in a blog?

February 17, 2009 2:13 PM

How do I (semi) automatically publish links to many different articles, sorted by date, to a blog?

The university I work for gets lots of mentions in the news media every day. To keep track of this, they've been maintaining a daily email and (internal) web site linking to the coverage. Thus far, this has been created entirely manually.

In an effort to help streamline this, I suggested a few changes:

1. Track the clips in Delicious.com, annotate them and tag them by date (021709, for instance).

2. Either publish the Delicious RSS feed for that tag, by date, in a Wordpress blog (using a plugin) or

2a. Use Feedburner Buzzboost to accomplish the same. This is where we are at the moment.

This is working, somewhat. But as Delicious doesn't allow manual sorting of bookmarks within tags (right?), the order of the bookmarks is either by the order they were entered, or alphabetically. Because we'd like to sort the display by importance of clip, the only way I can see to do this is by prepending a number or letter (for the sort) to the headline.

So my question is this: Is there a better way? I'd prefer something we can cobble together, but if there's a product that does this, I'd look at that too.

Thanks for your help.

posted by timwindsor to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

You could do this within your existing setup in Delicious using a star rating (or equivalent) in the tags. A lot of people already use "****" as a tag.

The Delicious plugin for wordpress that I'm using lets you specify tags to show; if you call it once to fetch all your 4-star articles, then 3-star, etc, you've effectively sorted by importance. It's slightly hackish, but it will work.

If you really wanted to dig into it, you could directly manipulate the Delicious feed to sort by these star ratings. It would require a little programming, but be straightforward for someone who knows what he's doing.
posted by adamrice at 2:25 PM on February 17, 2009

Just poking my nose in (as a Delicious employee) to say that adamrice's idea sounds good.

Sorting a growing collection of bookmarks by priority can get tedious ("should bookmark x be number 8 or number 11 on this 30-item list?") — which is part of why this isn't a Delicious feature — but using an ad-hoc star-rating tag system could help you arrange items by rough priority and also view the data in interesting ways: you could see the feed of all top-quality bookmarks across subjects by looking at the "*****" tag.

Delicious bookmarks are also searchable and don't require much technical expertise (for future maintainers), etc. For fanciness, there's a Greasemonkey script that makes it easy to add Unicode stars (★).

Here's one existing university-keeping-track-of-things account that I know of: ColgateNewsmakers.
posted by dreamyshade at 12:20 AM on February 18, 2009