After writing about how to see the number of times an article has been bookmarked on del.icio.us, it occurred to me that it would be incredibly easy to write an application to loop through all the pages on a website and check the del.icio.us count for each one, giving a total at the end.
Note: This software will take an incredibly long time to calculate the entire total, because del.icio.us requires a delay of a couple of seconds between requests. I set the delay to 10 seconds between requests, so if you have 1000 pages in your site it's going to take you nearly 3 hours. If you don't use that delay, you'll end up being blocked by del.icio.us. Best to let it run overnight.
Total bookmarks for How-To Geek: 9296
So how does this work?
- You will need to have an XML Sitemap for your site. (Read about creating a sitemap, or here's a Wordpress plugin for you)
- The software reads in the sitemap, and then loops through all the URLs in the Sitemap, requesting the JSON data for each one. Each URL is added to the textbox along with the count, and a total is displayed at the bottom of the window.
- The items added to the textbox are tab-delimited, so if you do a select all and copy the text, you can paste it into Excel or Google Docs as a spreadsheet, where you can sort it and figure out which articles have the most bookmarks.
- You will need to have the .NET framework version 2.0 installed for this to work. There's no installation process, it's just a zipped up executable.
- If you end up getting blocked by del.icio.us, it's just a temporary block and if you wait a few hours they'll unblock you. Just don't say I didn't warn you.
This software is provided with no guarantee that it will work at all. In the unlikely event that it does work, I'd be interested to know what your totals are.
NOTE: This is the updated version 0.0002 which fixes the problem some people were having with unified sitemaps.