For years I’ve used del.icio.us to store interesting links. A few weeks ago I started looking for a way to move my large library of links into my Movable Type-powered weblog. You can export links from del.icio.us, but it comes as in the Netscape bookmark, which Movable Type can’t read. This Ask Metafilter post gave me the solution: save del.icio.us’s RSS feed, import it into Wordpress, and then import the Wordpress blog into Movable Type. The method I used is the one user Memo describes here. He’s since written a Wordpress tool that should do it more easily.
Since Wordpress is free and Dreamhost will install it with one click, I set up a temporary blog as a middle man between del.icio.us and Movable Type. A few notes on what I did:
- Using the RSS Feed method, you only get 100 entries at a time. del.icio.us has a batch edit feature, so if you set your view to see 100 entries per page, you can export the RSS feed and then use batch edit to select all the entries on the page, delete them, and then download a new RSS feed with the next 100 entries. Make a backup of your links first if you do that so that you can restore your backups when you’re done.
- Wordpress will import del.icio.us’s tags as categories. It has a converter you can use to make them tags.