Building Tag Clouds in Perl and PHP

Collecting del.icio.us Tags in PHP

Our second PHP script, getDeliciousTags.php, produces a list of tags from themost recent entries in your del.icio.us account. If you don't have a del.icio.usaccount, you can either get one (it's free) or use my username (jbum) as I'm doingin these examples. You can view my del.icio.us bookmarks at the following URL: http://del.icio.us/jbum .

Del.icio.us provides tags in an RSS feed. To collect and parse the RSS data, we'lluse the library magpie RSS, a freely available RSS parser for PHP. You candownload magpie at: http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/

You will need to follow the instructions that come with magpie RSS to install it onyour server.

Because this script deals with RSS data, it looks a bit different than the previousscript. Let's examine it in detail:

<?
//
// Collect delicious tags (or load them from a cache)

function getTags()
{
  global $tags;

Again, the script contains a single function, getTags(), which is responsible forbuilding up the global associative array, $tags.

 // use the parameter 'who' to determine which account to poll
 // it defaults to 'jbum'

 $who = 'jbum';
 if (isset($_GET['who']))
   $who = $_GET['who'];

The previous lines determine which del.icio.us account you are collecting tags for.If one is specified in the URL parameters, it will be used, otherwise, my account,'jbum' will be used.

 // remove troublesome characters from name
 $who = preg_replace('/\W/', '',$who);

Since this script is intended to be used on a web site, we have ...