hebig.org/blog

"Von hinten durch die Brust ins Auge" is a German saying for doing something in an overly complicated manner. For doing something like I outlined yesterday in my entry on pulling del.icio.us links into this website. If you add links via the API, why use Magpie, but not the API to retrieve them? Just because of the caching? Huh?

The API PHP class works OK, but as expected, problems with German umlauts occur (help anyone?). For now, I use the API to pull the latest 10 Quick Links (del.icio.us tag: "is:quicklink") into this blog. They appear right below the latest blog entry, so everything below the Quick Links box is old stuff. I am not exactly happy with this solution, but putting the links into the sidebar would require considerable changes to the layout (too small sidebar on smaller screen resolutions). As long as I play around with my link submission form, the Quick Links box will stay where it is. Perhaps it will even disappear altogether from this site later - the entire list is just one link away anyway.

UPDATE 2004-11-09
The umlaut issue is fixed. To stay with proverbs, I didn't see the wood for the trees in terms of character encoding. Thanks Scott for giving directions and wielspm at xs4all dot nl for a helpful code fragment in the PHP documentation.