a quick and delicious note

Very short one today, while I continue to procrastinate on longer posts as they continue to lose relevance.

Anyway, most of you probably already have heard about the rumour last December about how Yahoo was planning on sunsetting Delicious (formerly known as del.icio.us), its very cool, very useful, social bookmarking service. Upon hearing of this, I was filled with panic at the thought of losing the thousands of nicely tagged bookmarks that I have in the service, and scrambled to move to another service, and posted something last December describing how to do it, as it wasn’t exactly intuitive.

Anyway, as most of you probably also know, Yahoo has now struck a deal that will see Avos, a company started up by the YouTube guys, continue the service, which is good news. However, if you are a delicious user, you will need to opt-in in order to allow the conversion over to Avos. Otherwise, poof, your bookmarks will disappear into the ether once the transition is completed. So go do it now. You just need to login and click a button, and Bob will be your uncle.

A bit too late for me. Already made the painful transition over to Diigo (which is pretty good) and added a zillion more bookmarks, and don’t plan to repeat the exercise.

Tip o’ the fedora to RWW.

exporting bookmarks with tags from delicious

So as many of you have already heard, it looks like Yahoo will be shuttering delicious. Sad but apparently true. In any event, one would think that it would be a relatively simple matter to export from delicious and import into your browser’s bookmarks. The export part is relatively straightfoward, but (at least for those using Firefox, which I do), if you want to import your tags along with your bookmarks, things get a little trickier, because of some incompabitilies between the format that delicious uses for its export file (html) and the format that Firefox uses (JSON).

Apparently, some folks far cleverer than I came up with some ruby scripts that can do it, but why go to all that trouble. Here’s the easiest solution I’ve been able to find: Go here but before you follow the steps, make note of the following:

  1. instead of typing in the URL identified in Step 2 (http://api.del.icio.us/posts/all) use this one instead: https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all (you need to copy and paste into the location bar).
  2. In Step 6, there is one minor detail omitted – the steps to restore should be [Bookmark] -> [Organize Bookmarks] -> [import and backup] -> [Restore] -> [Choose file] -> <created file at 5>.
  3. Also in Step 6, if you have a lot of bookmarks be forwarned that Firefox may become non-responsive as it processes the import. It may give you the “script is taking a long time to respond” message. If you do get that, select the “don’t ask again” checkbox and then click “continue”, then go grab a coffee or some other beverage. Once its done, you should have all your bookmarks (and tags) from delicious now safely ensconced in your Firefox bookmarks.

If you still need an online bookmarks tool, consider Mozilla Sync or Diigo. Perhaps not surprisingly, there seems to be a bit of a backlog in processing imported bookmarks into Diigo. If you don’t need to import bookmarks into Firefox and plan to use something like Diigo exclusively, then of course no need to go through all of the hassle above, as (from what I understand) Diigo will import tags when you import your delicious bookmarks.

Goodbye delicious, it’s been nice knowing you.