Exporting del.icio.us Bookmarks to Movable Type Entries

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.

Please Don't: Email and Tweet Your Bookmarks

To add to my argument that one shouldn’t clutter up one’s Twitter account with information that’s better delivered by RSS, del.icio.us now allows you to spam your Twitter account with every site you bookmark. If done (im)properly, I’ll now get to your bookmarks in my RSS reader, my Twitter client, and my del.icio.us network!

del.icio.us + Facebook

del.icio.us earlier this week rolled out an official Facebook app, which will publish your links onto your Facebook profile. I wasn’t able to get it to work initially, but DrOct found the link to the del.icio.us application, which worked for me once I clicked through a few pages. (The URL has the “wm” subdomain. Not sure if it’ll redirect properly if you’re on a different network, but you could try changing that manually.) I might look into adding my Vox feed on there, too, at some point.

I’m new to the Facebook trend. After Friendster fizzled I gave up mostly on the social network thing, but Facebook seems to have its act together and is a pretty nice platform.

In other web publishing news, there’s a new version of Movable Type out in beta. kwc has written a few things about it, but so far I’ve avoided to desire to tinker. In the end I love tinkering with things but lose interest whenever I have to do too much backend server work. TypePad in the past has gotten that balance for me just about perfect, and now that it supports Markdown I’m much inclined to switch back there. My hesitation is that Vox does so much so nicely, it’s free, and even with cross-posting I don’t like keeping more than one blog. In the back of my mind I’m toying with finding a place to park the frontpage of my domain somewhere free, and just syndicate everything from Vox and del.icio.us to it, which is mostly what I do now, anyway, on david.ely.fm. If Vox were to support domain mapping all my troubles would go away, but I don’t see that happening on such an entry level-aimed service.

face hugger

face hugger

del.icio.us app for Facebook.

"Favorites" on del.icio.us

If you go to anyone’s page on del.icio.us, the page title is now called “username’s favorites on del.icio.us” (here’s mine). Didn’t they used to call them “bookmarks?”

Update Feb. 9: it looks like it’s browser-related. If I load my page on IE it’s called “favorites,” in Firefox it’s “bookmarks.” I guess they scripted that in there so that you’d get a term you’re more familiar with.

del.icio.us: tagometer: badges badges badges badges BOOKMARKS BOOKMARKS

del.icio.us: tagometer: badges badges badges badges BOOKMARKS BOOKMARKS

I’m not a huge fan of those buttons at the bottoms of posts, but this is a nice implementation.

del.icio.us to Google Bookmarks

del.icio.us to Google Bookmarks

Tool to import del.icio.us links into Google’s Bookmarks utility. I don’t know why you’d want to, but there it is.

Six Apart - Everything TypePad - Two del.icio.us Widgets

Six Apart - Everything TypePad - Two del.icio.us Widgets

Good stuff. This makes everything much easier.

del.icio.us Dish

I like what del.icio.us has done with their permalinks, if you can call them that. The pages you’d probably view most frequently on the site are the pages that belong to different people with their links on them. But if you click on the part of a link that says “saved by x other people,” you’ll get a page about the item everyone’s linking to. Here’s a good example, using Will Wright’s Spore demo on Google Video. On that page is a collection of everything those people said about that link, a list of who they are, and what tags they’ve given that link. I’m not sure how useful it is to see lots of “this is awesome!”, but I think somehow it provides some value if you’re trying to find something out about a page. If nothing else it demostrates the web-ness of the web. If there’s a value to being able to find out the metadata about pages, these sorts of things are where that value will start to emerge.

NetNewsWire 2.1: Post to del.icio.us command

NetNewsWire 2.1: Post to del.icio.us command

Wonderful!

Guardian Unlimited Technology | Technology |'I want to build something that grows'

Guardian Unlimited Technology | Technology | ‘I want to build something that grows’

Article about del.icio.us’s Joshua Schachter.

del.icio.us/popular/comics

del.icio.us/popular/comics

del.icio.us and TypePad

A few years ago I wrote an entry about how to merge two TypePad weblogs onto one page so that you can have a “sideblog” with links in it. That method should still work, as does a Links TypeList, but I’m using del.icio.us to do it nowadays.

As a Sideblog

If you’d like your links to appear on the sidebar of your site, use this option.

1. First, create a free del.icio.us account and post a few links.
2. Within TypePad, select the weblog you want to use, go to the Design section, and click on “Change Content Selections” to select items in your sidebar.
3. Under “Feeds”, click “Add a new feed”.
4. In the pop-up box, enter:
   http://del.icio.us/username
   where username is whatever you chose for del.icio.us.
5. Choose how many items you want in your sidebar, and press “Save”.

As Daily Posts

You can set del.icio.us to make a daily post with all the links from the last 24 hours.

1. Log into del.icio.us, and go to:
   http://del.icio.us/settings/username/daily
   where username is your del.icio.us account name.
2. Click “add a new thingy”.
3. Enter the following:
   • jobname: any name you’d like. I used “typepad”.
   • outname: the name of your weblog, as it appears in TypePad.
   • outpass: your TypePad password.
   • outurl: http://www.typepad.com/t/api
   • outtime: the hour of day you’d like the links posted, in GMT. 0=midnight GMT, 23=11 PM GMT.
   • outblogid: Your TypePad blog ID. If you go into TypePad and select your weblog, the URL will look like this:
     https://www.typepad.com/t/app/
     weblog/manage?blogid=somenumber
     Enter in the number at the end.
   • outcatid: The ID of the category you’d like to publish into. I haven’t gotten this to work, but it works fine without it.
4. Press “Submit Query”.

You’ll have to wait until your out_time to see if it worked, but once it does it’ll post an entry every 24 hours containing all the new links you’ve entered into del.icio.us.

Pros and Cons

Both approachs have their virtues. Using a sideblog keeps links out of the main flow of your posts, which is nice if you want to seperate what you write from what you link to. It also keeps links out of your XML feed. Readers who want to read your links can subscribe to your del.icio.us feed, but people reading your TypePad feed will continue to just get “real posts” you’ve written.

Using digest posts is good if you’d prefer to keep everything in one column. The daily post method will put the links into your feed, so anyone reading your feed will get everything on your site. If you don’t post entries that often, but you post links every day, this’ll keep content flowing on your site, which might be a good thing. On the other hand, it may also mean that your page will be filled mostly with links to things instead of full posts, and some people don’t like to be reminded about how prolific they’re not.

del.icio.us: casting the net wider

del.icio.us: casting the net wider

del.icio.us adds automatic tagging for music and video files, plus auto-generated podcasts.

Folksonomies Tap People Power

Folksonomies Tap People Power

Wired article on tagging