Delicious

There has been a lot of fuss about del.icio.us shutting down (along with AltaVista— my goodness, I used that when I was an undergrad. How weird to see it go).

I am worried that someone out there is going to go to all the effort of writing a new del.ici.ous. Or more likely several someones, and all the results will be incompatible. As Mark Pilgrim points out, this is a bad idea. Don't do it.

I'd like to offer a better suggestion. Write something that takes the not-really-XML of the del.icio.us backup format and uploads it line by line to a given identi.ca account. So, for example,

<DT><A HREF="http://www.paulmeier.com/ipa/charts.html" ADD_DATE="1104124425" PRIVATE="0" TAGS="flash,linguistics,phonetics">Flash-based IPA charts</A>

becomes

http://www.paulmeier.com/ipa/charts.html Flash-based IPA charts #flash #linguistics #phonetics

That way

• you keep your bookmarks somewhere
• that somewhere runs on free software
• tags still work
• you can make feeds
• you can get daily dumps added to your blog

and so on.  If there's something it can't do, it's far better to do it in identi.ca and then extend identi.ca than to write a whole new site.

The main issue is that the string becomes longer than 140 characters, but there are ways around that.

If anyone writes such a script, let me know and I'll link it here.