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Simon Willison’s Weblog

Blogmarks on del.icio.us

I’m horribly ill again: having defeated the mumps I now seem to have come down with some kind of ’flu thing. Lovely. In between whinging about my state of health and watching episodes of Frasier I’ve been playing with del.icio.us as part of my research in to web annotation. The connection between the two isn’t particularly strong but it’s clear that something very exciting is happening over there.

This evening I wrote a script to import my blogmarks in to del.icio.us. I don’t plan to replace them with a feed from the site for a couple of reasons: firstly, I like to keep my data somewhere I control and secondly, del.icio.us doesn’t support my “via” fields. I will however be adding tag support to my blogmarks and some kind of functionality to ensure that anything I post to them is added to del.icio.us as well.

The problem I have now is that I’ve added nearly 1200 untagged links to del.icio.us, and anyone who has played with the service for more than a few minutes knows that it’s the tags that make it so much fun. Does anyone know of a good tool for bulk-tagging of items in del.icio.us? I’ve tried Cocoal.icio.us but unfortunately it only lets you assign tags to items one at a time; what I really want to do is run full text searches against my del.icio.us links and mass-apply tags to dozens of items at a time. If one doesn’t exist I can always knock up a custom tool with the lovely API but I’d rather not duplicate the effort if I don’t have to.

Posted 2nd December 2004 at 12:13 am

This is Blogmarks on del.icio.us by Simon Willison, posted on 2nd December 2004.

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13 comments

  1. One day the feature set of Flickr will merge with the feature set of del.icio.us, and we'll be able to collaboratively tag other people's links, though only the links of people on our "contact list", or whatever del.icio.us decides to call it.

    Richard - 2nd December 2004 01:15 - #

  2. I don't think any bulk tagging tools exist, but if you create one, I'll use it :)

    As for the "via" thing: I've seen a few people have starting tagging their bookmarks "via:somesite.com" and I assume they later pull that tag out specially and use it to create a via link. This is an ugly hack, but it's actually pretty cool since it will let you see all the links you've gotten from a given site.

    Jacob Kaplan-Moss - 2nd December 2004 03:03 - #

  3. Hey Simon, One of our contributors is currently working on adding full text search to Cocoal.icio.us (there are currently bits of it in the CVS version, but I've been turning it off in the released versions until it's in better shape). As for tag assignment to multiple posts, it's pretty inexcusable that it doesn't do that now, I admit. I'll work on that, I promise.

    Buzz Andersen - 2nd December 2004 03:09 - #

  4. Cool Simon, You've beaten me to doing something that's been on my todo list for a while. I've been keeping bookmarkey things at http://ratings.mkenny.net/ for two-and-a-half years, and decided that I want to import them into del.icio.us as well.

    I too, want to keep on using my own system as well, not least because I do a rather lame full-text index on each page I bookmark -- this has saved me when finding stuff, on numerous occasions.

    Get well soon :-)

    Martin Kenny - 2nd December 2004 03:44 - #

  5. Hi Simon

    Have you considered writing an auto-tag parser?

    I see two approaches:

    #1: Scan the extended description of the link for certain words (that you can predefine). Should the words exist in the extended description, then those are the post�s tag.

    #2: Parse the extended description for words that are longer than n. Those that are, are the post�s tags.

    Naturally, this automated approach is no way as good as a human editor, nevertheless a nice little hack, IMHO.

    Sam

    Sam James - 2nd December 2004 07:09 - #

  6. I'm sure you're aware of this, since I got the link from you, but why not use delicious.py? If it doesn't do what you want, at least you have a starting point in a language you like.

    Jeremy Dunck - 2nd December 2004 14:22 - #

  7. Hah! Completely independently I've added del.icio.us support to my Blogmarks too. I'm still perfecting it (before I blog it), but essentially I've hacked together some JavaScript to create tags from my categorisation system (and allow me to add other tags as required) and use PHP to post the result.

    When I hit submit, the new Blogmark goes into my system so it matches my blog categories and can be searched, etc and it also gets posted to del.icio.us along with its tags.

    I haven't worked out a way to automatically add my back catalogue as yet, at least not in a way that wouldn't get me banned from del.icio.us. I've got a few ideas though, which I'll post when they are a bit better formulated.

    Richard Rutter - 2nd December 2004 14:37 - #

  8. Nice. I also implemented cross-posting to del.icio.us with my homebrew link blogging system. This works well for me because I maintain control over my link blog, I have tags with spaces (hooray!), and I have via links, but I can use del.icio.us as a public searchable archive of my links. Not to mention that

    As for bulk tagging of your existing del.icio.us links, am I missing something, or does the API doc not mention a way to edit existing links?

    jacob - 2nd December 2004 15:42 - #

  9. Apologies -- I inadvertantly hit the post button while editing the above comment. I simply wanted to chime in and encourage anyone using a handmade link blogging system to consider cross-posting to del.icio.us, because the site becomes increasingly useful and interesting as more users participate.

    jacob - 2nd December 2004 15:47 - #

  10. Jacob, it's not just you; the API doesn't mention edits. Fortunately, it appears that doing an add on an existing uri edits the existing post.

    I just did a test like so:
    http://del.icio.us/api/posts/add?url=http://exampl e.com&description=an+example&extended=&tags=first+ test&dt=2004-12-03T00:09:00Z
    Then:
    http://del.icio.us/api/posts/add?url=http://exampl e.com&description=another+example&extended=&tags=s econd+try&dt=2004-12-03T00:09:05Z

    This resulted in a link to http://example.com under the description "another example" with tags "second" and "try".

    Jeremy Dunck - 3rd December 2004 01:26 - #

  11. Check this out: http://dev.dmmc.lv/laacz/del.icio.us/

    Required - 8th December 2004 08:40 - #

  12. Lazyweb: Please, please would someone write a script to automatically import my Powermarks bookmarks into del.icio.us? I have 4780 metatagged bookmarks in my Powermarks database, which is simply a flat HTML file stored on my HDD and sync'd to Kaylon's servers. Powermarks has a fantastic interface; I'd never be able to rely on del.icio.us alone.

    Francois Jordaan - 22nd December 2004 14:55 - #

  13. I love the function in Firefox that allows you to put all the tabs you've opened in one window and put them all in folder in bookmarks. With just a few keystrokes you save all the searching you've done within one search session.

    However, now that I'm a devoted del.icio.us fanatic, this is about the only purpose I use bookmarks for. So, given the subject of this thread, is there yet a utility to tag all the items in one bookmark folder? Yet?

    Frank Poliat - 12th August 2005 16:27 - #

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