Disruptive Conversations

With the word out today that Yahoo will be shutting down Del.ico.us at some point in the near future (per TechCrunch and AllThings D), the buzz on Twitter tonight has been all about how to backup your del.icio.us bookmarks... and what other services to use. Having been a long-time user of delicious, with literally thousands of bookmarks over many years, I was naturally concerned and followed the conversations closely.

The net of all that is that there are two simple ways to backup your bookmarks today (and I've done them both).

First, you can simply go to:

https://secure.delicious.com/settings/bookmarks/export

You will get a HTML file that includes all your links and notes and, in the HTML source, all your tags.

Second, for the more technically inclined with access to the "curl" command from a command prompt, you can issue this command:

curl https://[username]:[password]@api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all > bookmarks.xml

which will get you a nice XML file full of all your bookmarks, tags and notes. This worked like a charm in a terminal window on my Mac. (Hat tip to @andrew_k on Twitter for this tip and to @pfhyper who retweeted it.)

Now that you have either or both an HTML or XML file you can then import those into some other service... or at the very least have access to your bookmarks. You obviously don't have the "social" aspect of del.icio.us, which is where so much of the power lies... but you do have all your bookmarks.

Note that in theory you should be able to issue these commands up until Yahoo! shuts down the service... so if you keep bookmarking sites in the weeks ahead, just remember to re-issue these commands from time-to-time to keep a local backup.

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