paullll irish: how can i learn regular expressions?
paullll irish: best
designgods: Hmmm..
designgods: you’re looking to learn ruby regex, I assume?
designgods: I learned from a Perl book, then moved to the Perldoc regex references. Since Ruby shares an almost identical syntax, that should be a good start. If you have perl installed on your machine follow examples in a terminal or run a .pl file to get the hang of it.
designgods: move up to larger bodies of text… find some READMEs and see what you can parse out.
designgods: finally, once you’ve gotten a good feeling, move to the ruby regex docs as well as other illustrative resources (Why’s (poignant) Guide was a great overview, and I think he goes into regex a bit)
paullll irish: :D
paullll irish: DONE! thank you!

Update: Feed43, mentioned in my post, has now lost data and I’d consider an unreliable pick. You can now use Yahoo Pipes and Dapper to do the same. I recommend both.

Del.icio.us is has social networking, but doesn’t really make those features very prominent, so you may not have noticed. The network page is the most helpful piece of aggregation. After you friend people, their bookmarks will be aggregated there: paul.irish’s network page on del.icio.us. One feature that hasn’t been implemented is notification of new people adding you to their network. I wanted to be kept aware, but I couldn’t use a service like ChangeDetection (mentioned in my post here), because the entire page was changing all the time. I needed to isolate a small part of the page.

I used a service called Feed43. It takes a while to get the filtering right. Basically you have to tell the parser how to identify news items. Here’s some photos that should help show how to do it:

In the end, I came out with a good looking RSS feed of my del.icio.us network fans: http://feed43.com/paulirish-network-newfriends.xml Now whenever anyone adds me to their network, a new RSS item will be created and I’ll see! Score.

Every 60 days I get an email that tells me my free custom DNS entry (yes-ip.no-ip.org) is expiring. (Yes, I chose a very clever prefix..) Here’s the email:

Getting an email every 60 days and clicking a link doesn’t kill me, but it’d be super nice to not have to.

So I’m using another free service to preemptively renew this host. ChangeDetection will email you any time a page changes. (So you can assume it’s visiting a site regularly to check its content.)

But what to use for the email? I don’t really want it emailing me about changes to the site’s footer or whatever, so I’m going to use a throwaway account. But at the same time, I know there’s an email confirmation step on this site.

2Prong to the rescue! Visit 2prong and it copies a temporary email address to your clipboard automatically. Then the site will check (via ajax) for new email to that address and automatically display it when it comes in.

Then I just click that confirmation link and I’m all set! WOO!