How (and where) to download your del.icio.us bookmarks
Last Friday’s announcement that Yahoo is buying del.icio.us has probably got more than a few people thinking about the future of the service and whether they want to keep using it. In any case, as with all of the interesting and useful web services out there, it’s good to take time now and then to back up your personal data, in case something goes sideways and the service becomes unavailable or unusable for whatever reason.
I’m personally planning on continuing to use del.icio.us, although there are a number of interesting tagged bookmarking alternatives out there, including running your own.
The first step is to get your personal bookmark data, which can be obtained through the del.icio.us API. You can retrieve all your saved bookmarks at del.icio.us/api/posts/all, which will return an XML file that can be saved to your local system and used as a backup or to import your bookmarks into another web application elsewhere.
The next step is to decide what you want to do with the data. Some alternative tagged bookmarking solutions include:
The following services are based on open source projects, so you can (or in some cases have to) run your own bookmarking system.
- Scuttle (built on PHP)
- De.lirio.us (built on Perl/Rubric)
- MySqlicious (mirror your tags into MySQL, bring your own application)
Yahoo already runs MyWeb2.0, which presumably will begin to merge with del.icio.us at some point. It has a lot of interesting features, but hasn’t had enough to get me to switch over up to this point. I’ve been wanting private bookmarks and tags on del.icio.us for a while, although I think I’ll be moving those off my desktop onto a roll-your-own server solution.
Any more suggestions? Reply in the comments and I’ll pull them up to the main post.
Here’s an extensive list of free bookmark managers at lights.com (via David Beisel)
Also note that Simpy supports both private AND public bookmarks.
If you are looking for a private bookmarking solution try:
http://looklater.com
Bookmarks to links, pages or images are created via a bookmarklet with a single click. Once a bookmark is in your archive your can use one of a number of built-in tools to tag it on one of the social bookmarking sites.
Check it out if you get a chance.
- Doug Martin
Creator, LookLater