Posted on December 20, 2005 at 5:15 PM in round-ups
Note: The below is an archived entry from Earthling, formerly EarthLink's official blog. The blog itself has been decommissioned and is no longer updated, and comments are trackbacks are no longer accepted.
I sat down to write a tutorial on how to back up your del.icio.us bookmarks, but a couple of thoughts intervened before it got out the door. First, I haven't had a chance to properly introduce you to del.icio.us, and here I am already trying to show you how to back it up.
Second, I tried installing the Foxylicious extension for Firefox, and had enough (small t) troubles with it that I'm not ready to recommend it yet as the most painless way to go troubles with it because I had the wrong version of Firefox installed. And there were a slew of other options out there too.
Nevertheless, last week's outages were an important reminder to back things up regularly, and my bookmarks are vital to what I do. Rather than write a tutorial *yet*, today I'm offering a list of some of the places you can look for ways to back up your del.icio.us account. Non-del.icio.us users, sorry for today's departure. I won't be offended if your eyes glaze over -- hope to see you tomorrow just the same.
- Use del.icio.us' export: Go to http://del.icio.us/settings/yourusername/export/ ( replace "yourusername" with your user name), hit "export to html", and save the resulting page as an html page.
- Another quick-and-dirty way: Go into your del.icio.us page, grab the RSS feed, browse it, and save it as an xml page. Thanks to Shawn for suggesting this.
- If you use Safari: Delicious2Safari might be the guy you are looking for. This was pretty much no muss, no fuss, easy pleasy for me. I downloaded the disk image, dragged it to my Applications folder, and ran it. Here's the developer's blog if you want to read more about it before you try.
- If you use Firefox: There is Foxylicious, an extension that pulls your bookmarks down into folders in Firefox. If you install the latest version of Foxylicious, make sure you are using Firefox 1.5.
- Via spreadsheet: (not yet recommended)This smart person made a spreadsheet that you can download that will *theoretically* suck down all of your del.icio.us data. I can't get it to work on my machine -- maybe it's not for macs.
- Command-line way: here's a curl command (and another) to write an xml file of all your stuff. Unless you know what a command line is and what curl is, better to leave this one alone.
- A few more for the developers: Here's a way that uses Python to back up del.icio.us to a gmail account. Or maybe you'd prefer a Ruby script. Good luck to you.
I'll keep updating this list as I find them. If there are any that I've missed, particularly really easy ways, send them my way and i'll add them on.
Now we've all been warned. No whining next time del.icio.us experiences some downtime.