RIP Delicious: Now Back Up Your Bookmarks »

Linked to on December 16th, 2010 at 8:24 PM

Delicious never seemed to live up to its potential and keep up with the pace of innovation on the web, but I still liked using the site. It was hard not to be nervous about it though given it seemed like it was always priority 999 in Yahoo's web strategy. Between that feeling and my increasing trust issues with any service that is totally cloud-based1, I decided to abandon my use of it a couple months ago. Instead, I began to store all of my bookmarks in Yojimbo, and I can't say I have looked back once.

When I made the move, I checked out a couple of the Delicious to Yojimbo scripts that are out there on the web, but I never did a full import of everything because the scripts only got me 90% of what I wanted. I have had on my someday / maybe list to write a better Applescript for the import, but haven't done it yet. I suppose that just got moved up on the priority list.

That said, I'd recommend if you have anything on Delicious, you do what I did tonight and get a full XML dump of your Delicious bookmarks. It might take all of 60 seconds.

It's pretty simple. Just drop into Terminal and execute the following command (replacing yourusername and yourpassword with your individual info, of course):

    curl -u yourusername:yourpassword  https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all > delicious-bookmarks.xml

That will give you everything from your Delicious account in one XML file that can be parsed at will in the future.


1. An example of a cloud-based service that does it right? Dropbox. All my data that's on there is also synced to my local machine (which means it is also getting backed up to three other spots).↩

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