Creating a “personal curriculum” podcast with del.icio.us

At my current client, I have found myself throwing out a number of links at people. I often do this, but more recently, I’ve begun passing links to my del.icio.us account, appropriately segmented by tag or tags.

For instance, at a certain point in almost every project involving a UI, there’s usually a hunt for set of good icons.

Of course, none of this is news worthy, Jon Udell was here l o n g before me.

What was a revelation to me was trying to work out how to get the series of random mp3s I was recommended to listen to on to my iPod. While researching the Jon Udell link, I found someone else was here long before me too. Though we came up with different refinements, we both used the same idea.

Both of us use the special system:filetype:mp3 tag that del.icio.us has.

My own special refinement is making the publishing slightly neater – the colons in the URL seem ugly, and I’m not quite sure how iTunes deals with podcasts that haven’t got their special extensions.

Passing the desired feed through feedburner’s SmartCast service cleans up the URL and puts the silly iTunes enclosures in, so you don’t have to.

So now, I’ve got a mechanism to get the dispersed mp3 files that I recommend straight into your iPod, without too much fuss for you, dear podcast listener. And I can do the same for people recommending mp3s for me.

This gives a tidier frontend to the podcast; but I have found that the generation of these del.icio.us entries has been a pain.

Pascal van Hecke’s method, above, concentrates on this very problem. I haven’t tried it (not using firefox on this machine), but I’m looking for a “bookmark this link with the data from this page” type functionality.

If I can get this production workflow going more smoothly, I shall be adding to my own personal curriculum more frequently.