Experimental feature that can automatically post entries to your blog every day containing your latest links.

Well, ever since Yahoo! launched Delicious 2.0 (which I really like), this experimental feature has stopped for working for many, many people, including me. This explains the lack of activity on this blog for the past couple of weeks.

So what happened? I did some digging around and found this thread on the Delicious support forum. From this thread it’s pretty clear that the Blog Posting feature was not much of a priority for them because only a small minority of Delicious users used this feature. Here is a recent (5 days ago) update from Delicious staff:

Hi everybody – let me explain a little bit about the status of this feature.

First, it turns out we messed up. We intended to just reproduce the old functionality – so the additional [delicious.com] was never supposed to be there, and neither was the apparent 50 posts limit…or the timestamp problems, or these errors.

This is a tough feature, with a disproportionate amount of complexity in it compared to it being a smallish part of Delicious (and used by a smallish number of people). It produces output that gets interpreted by several different kinds of endpoints (WordPress, Movable Type, etc.) – all with their own unexpected inconsistencies – and by individual servers with varying configurations. We rewrote a lot of this feature in order so that it could work on the new Delicious platform, and it seems that we didn’t do it quite right. This is frustrating for all of us.

Daily blog posting also contains a long-standing security issue: we ask for your blog password and we store it. We take security very seriously and we carefully safeguard those passwords, but we’d rather not even know that kind of information about systems that are external to Delicious.

So, we plan to try to shift toward encouraging community-maintained third-party plugins for this functionality, instead of having people depend on us to push updates from a central point. Sonnoprofondo has very helpfully pointed out Postalicious, which is a great example of this for WordPress: http://neop.gbtopia.com/?p=108

We’ll be trying to fix daily blog posting, though. The [delicious.com] thing should be gone soonish. I don’t have a schedule for when the whole thing will function properly, since it’s weird and we do have a lot of other things to work on, but we want to make it work. The people who use this are a minority of Delicious users, but I know you guys are some of our most devoted. Thanks for as much patience as you can muster.

If their estimated timeframe of “soonish” goes another week or so, I will be looking at some other ways to share links on this blog – e.g. Postalicious. Or maybe I’ll actually get off my butt and write some real content for a change.

So Stay tuned. And thank you for your patience – all twelve of you. In the meantime, you can keep up with my links on Delicious, or better yet, follow me on FriendFeed.

If anyone from Delicious is reading this, please fix this soon. There are a few people who were making use of this feature.

More photos here.