The school district’s Links of the Day was created by importing bookmarks from social bookmarking tool Delicious. I wrote a script using the PHP PEAR library. It’s an extension of the PHP scripting language — which is pretty popular for web sites — that includes a way to connect to Delicious as one of its features. The script is scheduled to run every night, and automatically imports my newest bookmarks from Delicious, and adds them to a MySQL database. From there, I simply add the date I want it to appear, in my MySQL client, and another page (separate from the scheduled script) loads the data that was imported and shows all the bookmarks for the current day. When I get the chance, I’m going to add pagination features so all the links don’t appear on the same page, as well as the ability to search by tag and description.

I realize all that is probably more technical than anyone cares about or is necessarily capable of doing. Most teachers aren’t school webmasters, and just want a simple way to share links on their web site or blog. There are alternatives. Most sites and blogs have some way to display RSS feeds. If you use the feed of your Delicious bookmarks, you could stick your bookmarks on your site. This method doesn’t exactly provide an automatic “Link of the Day” but you can add a “Featured Links” to your site:

  1. Grab your Delicious account’s RSS feed: http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/{username} (replace {username} with your Delicious username).
  2. If you’d rather pull links in from a Delicious group, from a specific tag, etc. see this page for other feed options: http://delicious.com/help/json
  3. Stick this on, e.g., your blog sidebar as an RSS widget.

If your site doesn’t have native RSS functionality, or is just plain HTML code that gets uploaded and updated, you can embed a third-party widget like this one: http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/rss Grab the embed codes and just stick them on your site where you want it to show up. Links will now appear on your site as soon as you add them to Delicious. It’s not exactly a “Link of the Day” but at least you can share links with others in a simple way on your own site.

If you would rather have a “daily” link, you could do the following to get some semblance of this functionality. This method involves using a Twitter account, too:

  1. Create an account on TwitterFeed.
  2. Click “Create New Feed” and add your Delicious RSS feed as the new feed.
  3. Set the new feed contents to retrieve only every 24 hours, and only 1 item at a time.
  4. Connect this to your Twitter account in the “Configure Your Publishing Services” option.
  5. Use http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/rss or another RSS widget to embed this on your site.

Now only 1 new link per day will show on your site. Problem with this, at least 1 new link needs to be bookmarked per day for this to work. If you’re pulling these links from a large Ed Tech-themed Delicious group, where 100+ people are adding links all the time, it probably wouldn’t be a problem, though of course then you don’t have control over what shows up.