For months, on and off, I have been looking for some kind of simple WordPress plugin (or something along those lines) that would do for my collection of media what del.icio.us does for bookmarks. I like to use it as a sort of catalog of internet things that I think are worthy enough to pass on. My first attempt (labeled as Intake) sputtered and died after only a few weeks of usage, simply because I did not want to hand-code each entry.

At that same time I was already looking for some way to take the data from Delicious Library and have it spit out an RSS feed that could then be parsed for this site much like what Magpie does with the other (free) del.icio.us. I still have not found that. There was some hope when I read somewhere that DL can output XML but I gave up on that after not finding such an option. It also seemed incredibly cluttered and complicated considering I was hoping for something more web-based.

I briefly considered just creating another del.icio.us account and linking to Amazon with every post, something that would probably be the most straightforward but somehow also feels like cheating.

In the meantime, however, I came across a plugin called Addictions which, while it doesn’t do exactly what I’m looking for, is rather close and as a bonus, it’s simple enough to dissect and rearrange things to my liking. As a result, after maybe 30-45 minutes of fiddling with the code I now have a nice window into the media that currently keeps me from posting more often and generally being more productive. As a nice bonus, there are some things to look forward to with Addictions 2.0 when (if) that happens, and it sounds as though it will be evolving more into what I want, especially with the auto Amazon linking and the archive.

Something that the WordPress 2.0 update and this most recent plugin adventure made me realize is how much better I’m getting at messing around under the hood of this site. I still couldn’t write any kind of PHP from scratch to save my life, but I do enjoy going in and trying to figure out how to make stuff do what I want it to.