Over the holidays this blogs sub heading: mostly what we are doing with ict in class is becoming less and less true, it really should be ‘today I have been mostly messing about”. This post is no different.

A couple of posts ago I was writing about turning my del.icio.us rss feed into a tumble log, which turned out to be a matter of parsing the rss and making the fonts big. Compared to a real tumblelog it lacked a bit of colour as it was text only, big text but just text.

Today I messed about with the script a bit more and it now shows a flickr photo if there is a flickr photo page in my del.icio.us links and embeds youtube videos if the link points to a youtube page. This is done in a pretty crude fashion and it is probably not too robust, but it is working ok for now. I should probably do something for images too, but that would mean figuring out how to resize then on the fly to stop big ones blowing away the basic page layout. I don’t suppose I really bookmark images very often (well not al all).

So here is the basic page: A Tasty Tumble

What is perhaps useful in all of this fun is the idea that it could be adapted for classroom or group link sharing. To present a set of materials combining photos, videos and links in a slightly more interesting and accessible way to a class or group you just need to point the pupils to a particular tag (or combination of tags), for instance here are some Scratch Resources

At the moment the script only looks at my del.icio.us links, and the only parameters are tag and number of posts to show. but it would be easy enough to vary the user-name with another parameter.

As usual I am not sure where this experiment will go, but it might serve as an example of how easy it is for amateurs to mashup free rss feeds and api keys using free tools.
In this case I am using the Magpie RSS – PHP RSS Parser to get and parse the del.icio.us feed, the phpFlickr class to access the Flickr API and show flickr photos.

Anyone got any use for this sort of thing?

tumblelog del.icio.us mashup api flickr youtube