WordPress and del.icio.us: Making it work (and how to get rid of the 406 Error)
So recently I’ve really come to appreciate del.icio.us; clearly I’m late to the game. I had started using Google bookmarks and thought to myself, why not socialize ‘em!? So I installed the Firefox plugin and have been cruising ever since.
One of the things that I wanted to do is post my bookmarks automatically; that way, I can stop posting short blurbs about this or that link. Fortunately, this is possible. Here are the simple steps to start automatically posting your del.icio.us links to your blog:
- Set up a del.icio.us account (!)
- Go to settings
- On the right hand side under Blogging, click daily blog posting (note that this is an experimental feature)
- add a new thingy
- Fill out the relevant information. If you’re using WordPress, provide the full URL to the file called xmlrpc.php
- Blog ID = 1 worked for me, as I only have one blog
- The time is whatever time you want your bookmarks to post in military time + 5 if you’re on the East cost (i.e. If you want it to post at 1PM enter 18).
So I did this, and waited for the posting hour to occur, and no post! I went back to del.icio.us and saw that the the thingy had gotten a 406 error when it tried posting. After some google-fu I discovered that my hosting provider is running Apache with the mod_security enabled. Further fu showed me that this problem is easily solved by adding the following line to the end of your .htaccess file in the root of your blogging folder (for me that was public_html):
SecFilterEngine Off
That did the trick! However, this also turns mod_security off altogether! I’m not quite sure what the implications of this might be or how to rectify that situation. The next step is to wade through my server logs and figure out what exactly is triggering mod_security to give the 406 error… which means I have to deactivate del.icio.us posting for a bit, but I’ve already fallen in love with it.
Some things I would definitely like to see in the future is greater flexibility on how your links post is actually displayed. As far as I can tell, you don’t have a choice. Perhaps some PHP parsing + regular expressions could do the trick. Hmm…
Tags: .htaccess, 406, del.icio.us, mod_security, wordpress