Solo Technology

Following up from my recent “Captive Bookmarks” post, I’ve managed to wrangle my data out of my BlinkList account in a reasonably useful fashion. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not completely giving up on BlinkList, but last week was rough for them — and so was today. Frankly, I hope things smooth out now as I do like the service there.

How’d I get my data out? Well, as mentioned in the previous post, I used the BlinkList converter utility. I had to dice up my BlinkList export into several smaller files (under 1500 lines each) to get it done, but it created a set of “firefox bookmark format” files for me to work with. And it seems pretty much everyone will use those. After a closer look at that format, I realized my tags are included, so I’m hopeful that I can make this work.

One caveat, at least with Del.icio.us: That converter creates an attribute on the element for “tags” and for “SHORTCUTURL”. Their values are identical. The Del.icio.us importer treats them differently though. I ended up renaming SHORTCUTURL to something useless (ok, I globally renamed it to “IgnoreME”) so as not to generate extra weirdly named tags.

I figure I’ll look at some of the social bookmarking services I’ve looked at in the past. I’m starting with Del.icio.us (I first looked at ‘em last January) because that’s where the cool kids are still hanging out. I have one major issue to work out though. All my imported links are private. As near as I can tell, I have to individually set over 500 of them to be public. One by one. Surely there’s a better way?!?

Other than that issue, I’m pleased. It’s still … spartan … but fast and easy to use. The Firefox integration is sweet. No big ugly toolbar, just a couple of extra icons.

Rich is trying out Ma.gnolia and it looks interesting as well — especially the groups stuff. I may try importing my stuff over there next, now that I have some files that should work with most social bookmarking services.

5 Responses to “My Bookmarks Aren’t Quite So Captive”

1. Rich G. on October 3rd, 2006 5:53 am
   

   “All my imported links are private. As near as I can tell, I have to individually set over 500 of them to be public. One by one.”

   You’ve hit upon one of my pet peeves. One of the things I like about the online bookmark things is that I can see what ppl have bookmarked using tags similar to mine. If all imported bookmarks are private by default then some of what I use the online bookmark site for is lost due to the private problem. :/

2. Chris on October 3rd, 2006 6:38 am
   

   I can argue it both ways, really. But, if the imported links are going to be private by default, I’d expect to see an option, somewhere, to make all links public/private (yes, like BlinkList has.)

3. » pingback » Solved: Del.icio.us Imported Items Are All Private » Solo Technology on October 3rd, 2006 10:17 pm
   
   
4. Ivan on October 13th, 2006 7:27 pm
   

   Hellow there!
   First of all Thanx for the info on the post! I tried that Blinklist Converter and it converted ok to firefox or to del.icio.us format, but when i try to import them into del.icio.us, it doesn’t work! It’s Strange… isn’t it?
   Help would be appreciated

5. Chris on October 13th, 2006 8:52 pm
   

   Ivan, that is indeed strange! I have no wise words to offer. Of all the hoop-jumping I did, the del.icio.us import was by far the easiest part!
   I will say that the import is rather slow…

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