You may have heard, but Delicious is getting the boot.
I left Delicious long ago, because it never did anything for me. Yeah I could bookmark things, share them, whatever. I never went back to the bookmarks though. I wanted my bookmarks to work seamlessly with how I used the web. That means, it had to work with Google.
Back in the day
I used Google Bookmarks back when I was evaluating bookmarking apps in 2008 (when I settled on Delicious) and it wasn't that fantastic as I remember it. Now though, it's pretty slick.
I use the Bookmark and the Web History services. That way, all my bookmarks, as well as places I've been to but just haven't bookmarked, are integrated into my Google searches. No more what-was-that-site-again scenarios, I just search for kind of what I need, and it's at the top of my search results. If I'm really lost, I can go directly to the Google Bookmarks and Web History page and search there too.
Anyway, this whole Delicious thing got me thinking. I still had 600 bookmarks in Delicious sitting around. The fact that they've been there for 2 years without me doing anything about them should probably say something, but if I can keep them around, why not? I'm a bit of a data packrack.
Most of our imports come from overseas
With Delicious, you can export your bookmarks as everybody and their dog is doing, but what the hell do you do with them now?
Import them to Google Bookmarks, that's what.
But how?
Google Bookmarks doesn't have an API, or if it does, it's hard to find. Luckily, we live in an age of ruby and Selenium.
I wrote a little script that takes the Delicious export file, and uses the capybara rubygem to operate the Google Bookmarks Add Bookmark form to submit all your Delicious bookmarks to Google Bookmarks. It's pretty quick, maybe 10 or 15 minutes for my 600. You need Firefox installed, or check the capybara docs on how to tell it to use a different browser.
Run it like so: ruby delicious2Google.rb
johndoe@gmail.com password
delicious-12345.htm
Before I exported, I added the delicious tag to all my bookmarks so I'd know which ones came from Delicious. I'd recommend this too, and then you can refresh the Google Bookmarks page in another window to watch the import progress.
Happy importing.