I've been using del.icio.us to manage my links since about the first of the year, and I can't say enough good things about it. I love the idea of organizing my links via tags, and navigating the trail of other like-minded geeks. Plus, it solved the age old problem of having way to many computers, and no good place to put urls.

Since I started the new blog, I have been using a very easy service to include a link blog. You can see it on the right there, the RssInclude portion. Rssinclude was a free and (Very) easy way to include the feed in my site, or any site for that matter. On the other hand, though, it's not meant for del.icio.us. It's just an RSS feed, and I think my linkblog could be so much more.

Enter del.icio.us.net. I have been working on this for a bit now, and finally have something at least up on the internet now to check out. It's way basic, and way pre-alpha. Basically, I have wrapped up all of the del.icio.us rss handling in a few classes, and am in the process of making a few controls on top of that. The first will be a new linkblog sidebar with new, more del.icio.us friendly features. You can check it out here to see where it stands. Currently that page is implemented as a control that displays the links (with appropriate css selectors for when I get to formating), and a form to feed the tags and username to the control. It's pretty clean, and I'm shooting for xhtml strict (although I'll take transitional :).

The next steps are going to be to wrap up the API model, and then build a winforms app to make managing links easier. Since using del.icio.us is so easy, I often put links in with bad descriptions, mainly because I know that I WILL be interested in this, I'm just not yet. When I'm interested, though, I then have the context needed to appropriately tag and describe this link. I hope the winforms app will support this workflow better.

I do plan on releasing the code for this soon. It's almost in a beta to where I will release the core lib, test suite (yes, this is also my first foray into straight TDD, or as close as I can come :) more on this later), and the ascx to include your linkblog in your own sites. Stay tuned.