If you haven't used del.icio.us before, it's an online link manager that allows you to save links to useful things on the web, along with a description (so you can remember what the link was about) and some tags (to help you group them). The great thing is that unlike the set of favourites that are stored by your browser and will only work with that specific browser, you can get to your del.icio.us links from anywhere.
(For some, the most interesting thing about del.icio.us is that all of your bookmarks are public. In other words, other people can see your links, and you can see theirs--what has been called social bookmarking.)
del.icio.us not only provides an extremely useful service, but it also has a non-browser based interface to that service; this type of arrangement is often called an API, and it means that we can build our own link manager using whatever tools we want, as long as we post the right values to the del.icio.us servers.
Since everyone posts to the same URLs, the del.icio.us API needs some way of telling which store to place the data in. It does this by requiring you to authenticate. This is handled for us by XForms, but if you want to follow on with this example, you'll need to create a del.icio.us account.
If you don't already have one, you can obtain an account by going to the del.icio.us registration page.
To save links to del.icio.us we need to make an HTTP GET request to the following URL:
https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/add
The minimum parameters required are the URL of the link to be added, and a description. For example:
https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/add?url=http://skimstone.x-port.net&description=The+skimstone+site.Other parameters can be added, and they include more detailed notes about the link, a space-separated list of tags, a timestamp, a flag to indicate whether to replace any pre-existing information (if there is any) and a flag to indicate whether to keep the link private.
Details of other commands that can be used with posts are at http://del.icio.us/help/api/posts.