Visit 31 Days to Building a Better Blog

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Obviously (I hope!) you need to start by going to ‘Settings’ then ‘Postalicious’ in the admin area of your WordPress blog.

1. Set value for ‘Minimum bookmarks’ to 1.
2. Select ‘Post at most … bookmarks per post’ and set value to 1.

This will ensure that each new bookmark appears as a separate post on your blog. Unfortunately you can’t also set a specific time, so a new post will be added whenever Postalicious is updated. (Postalicious will update either hourly or automatically: you can change this at the top of the Postalicious settings page.)

Now to get it to display what you want. This is how I did it (see example post):

Settings

Post title (single day)

Changed value to %title%.

This makes the title of the post on your blog the same as the title of the bookmark on delicious.

Post title (two days)

Changed value to %title%.

You shouldn’t need to worry about this if you’re only displaying one post at a time, but it’s probably worth it just in case.

Bookmark

Changed value to <p>%date%</p><p>%description%</p><p><a href="%href%">Visit <strong>%title%</strong></a></p>

This is the bulk of the post, and you have quite a lot of control over configuring it if you know a little html. My code explained:

<p>%date%</p><p><a href="%href%">Visit <strong>%title%</strong></a></p>

1. <p> opens a paragraph
2. %date% will display the date the bookmark was added
3. </p> closes the paragraph.
4. Again, <p> opens a paragraph;
5. <a href="%href%"> opens the tag for a hyperlink
   • %href% adds the web address for the bookmark;
6. Visit <strong>%title%</strong> is extra text that I wanted to add
   • %title% inserts the title of the bookmark (as in ‘Post title…’ above);
   • <strong>%title%</strong> makes the title bold;
   • </a> closes the hyperlink;
7. </p> closes the paragraph.

That’s how I’ve done it anyway, but of course you can use whatever html you want.

Post template (single day)

Changed value to %bookmarks%.

This field can have other text and html, but it must contain %bookmarks% in it somewhere. %bookmarks% inserts everything from the ‘Bookmark’ field (explained above) into the main body of your blog post.

Post template (two days)

Same as for single day, above. You shouldn’t need this if you’re only displaying one post at a time, but better to be safe than sorry.

Notes

The values with percentage signs (%title%, %href%, etc) are the codes that Postalicious uses to add the content to your post. When you save the settings (don’t forget to do that!) these values will still be there. Don’t worry, the published post will look as it should do.

To make the posts look different I also tampered with my theme’s templates, but that’s more complex and beyond the scope of this post.

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Basically, WordPress wouldn’t let me use the word ‘settle’. Instead it returned a 403 error. However, it does seem to be working now. Very odd.

All I could find from Google was a similar weirdness from 2005, where WordPress had problems with words that were also PHP commands. But, as far as I can tell, ‘settle’ doesn’t seem to be a PHP command. And besides, that was four years ago.

This would just be an amusing quirk, if it wasn’t for the fact that I’m considering moving our entire organisation’s website – which could include a number of separately managed microsites – over to WordPress. Suddenly breaking for no apparent reason when typing an arbitrary word is a problem: not only is there no obvious reason and therefore no easy fix (other than to use a different word), it’s quite a job to isolate the problem in the first place.

That’s quite a bit of a bummer, actually.

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