Anti-social bookmarking (Bye delicious, Hello TiddlyWiki)
Jan 22, 2011The announcement by Yahoo! to shutdown the Social Bookmarking site delicious (or maybe not) opens the question of what to do with my bookmarks. Since the “social” part of it didn’t interest me but the tagging and central access did, I’m exporting it to a private TiddlyWiki, a browser-based wiki implemented in javascript that saves as a single local file.
Here is what I’ve done to create the local wiki and import the links from delicious. It’s very simple:
- Save a copy of the TiddlyWiki
wget http://www.tiddlywiki.com/empty.html
- Export the bookmarks as XML using the developer API
curl -u <username> https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all > delicious.xml
(It will prompt for a password) - Transform the XML bookmarks into XHTML “tiddlers” using a XSL
stylesheet. I use xsltproc
and my variation
twdelicious-url.xsl
with the link in the body of this stylesheet from Paul S.
Downey.
xsltproc --output delicious.tiddlers.xhtml --novalid twdelicious-url.xsl delicious.xml
- Load the wiki in a browser and import the tiddlers from the “Import” link in the “backstage” menu.
I now have a local copy, which is good, but no access to it from other locations. The options are upload it and keep it in sync or run a server-side implementation of the TiddlyWiki. I chose to check the file into a git repository and sync that repo with the one on my web server but Ben Gillies has instructions for running the Python TiddlyWeb reference implementation as a CGI so the bar is fairly low if I change my mind.