more del.icio.us hacks

I'm seeing more possibilities for library applications in del.icio.us. Seeing that you can use link rolls to generate links within a Web page, it seemed like it would be useful to be able to upload any lists of links you'd already published. Since delicious doesn't have a direct means of uploading links except through browser bookmarks, I set out to find a way to bulk load links from files into Firefox bookmarks and from there into delicious. I'd heard of "screen scraping" as a way of pulling the data from a Web site you were viewing, but searching Google didn't help find anything I could make use of.

In the process I found an article about exporting bookmarks from IE which mentioned the favorites file. That set me to looking for a bookmarks file, which I then copied to my desktop. This seems to be a simple html document with a DL tagged list. Copying the format for the entries I found there, I was able to upload a list of links I pulled from another file. (I haven't figured out how to display html tags within a blog post - it is treated as code instead of raw text.) After a bit of trial and error I was able to bulk load more than 1,000 entries into my Firefox bookmarks and from there directly into delicious.

http://del.icio.us/ldjaffe

Here I've encountered two new frustrations with delicious. First, it automatically marks all the items bulk loaded in this way as "unshared" and I haven't found a way to change this setting in a lump. Second, I'd like delicious to feature a link checker. That would make sense, no?

Back to the project: the idea isn't to have uploaded a lot of links for its own sake. I'm looking at ways to re-use this information in library guides once it has been properly tagged. I've started one example at my Geocities site.

http://www.jaffebros.com/pottery/

I hope this will replace the old pottery links site I started years ago. It currently runs on Filemaker but hasn't worked well since Filemaker has changed some of its features. It's not pretty at the moment but I'm just sketching in the raw content before I begin worrying about how it looks. I think there is enough there, however, to demonstrate the functionality.