When I discover delicious it was too late for me since at the time I had too many bookmarks already tagged in Yahoo’s Myweb. But since then I’ve always wanted to move all my bookmarks to delicious but didn’t found how to do it, until now.
Some days ago I found this python script that makes use of myweb and delicious web services to migrate the bookmarks.
Unfortunately the script wasn’t very reliable, it was crashing quite often and, since I have more than 1500 bookmarks, it was quite painful since every time I launched it, it was starting from scratch.
So I decided to build a new script (actually two)… in Ruby.
Step 1 : prerequisites
First of all you must install Ruby and rubygems on your system.
Then you must install rubilicious gem.
Step 2 : export myweb bookmarks
Here’s the first ruby script that you must run:
require 'uri'
require 'rexml/document'
# YOU WANT TO MODIFY THIS
yahoo_id = 'pix'
myweb_appid = 'YahooDemo'
myweb_urlsearch = 'http://search.yahooapis.com/MyWebService/V1/urlSearch'
request_start_idx = 1
request_max = 50
while(true)
url = myweb_urlsearch + '?' + {
:appid => myweb_appid,
:yahooid => yahoo_id,
:results => request_max,
:start => request_start_idx
}.to_a.collect {|kv| kv[0].to_s + '=' + kv[1].to_s}.join('&')
retries = 3
while(true)
$stderr.puts(" - Requesting URLs from [#{request_start_idx}] (#{retries} retries left) -> #{url}\n")
http_resp = Net::HTTP.get_response(URI.parse(url))
if(http_resp.code.to_i < 200 || http_resp.code.to_i > 299)
$stderr.puts(" ! request failed [#{http_resp.code}]\n")
retries -= 1
sleep(5) && next if(retries > 0)
$stderr.puts(" ! too many retries, something is broken!\n")
exit
end
break # exit while loop
end
xml_data = http_resp.body
# extract event information
doc = REXML::Document.new(xml_data)
tot_results = doc.root.attributes['totalResultsAvailable'].to_i
break unless tot_results > 0
doc.elements.each('ResultSet/Result') do |r|
puts [
r.elements['Title'].text,
r.elements['Summary'].text,
r.elements['Url'].text,
r.elements['Tags'].collect() {|e| e.text.to_s}.join(','),
].collect {|v| URI.escape(v.to_s) }.join('&') + "\n"
request_start_idx += 1
end
end
Copy this code and paste it to a file (like myweb_export.rb). You also want to set the yahoo_id variable with your myweb ID.
Then you can run the script:
Step 3 : import bookmarks into delicious
For the final step you’ll need the script below:
require 'uri'
r = Rubilicious.new('USER', 'PASSWORD')
$stdin.each_line do |l|
title, description, url, keys = l.split('&').collect { |i| URI.decode(i) }
keys = keys.split(',').collect { |k| k.strip.gsub(/\s+/, '-') }.join(' ')
puts title + "\n" + url + "\n" + keys + "\n---\n"
r.add(url, title, description, keys)
sleep(1)
end
You want to set the proper values for USER and PASSWORD of your delicious account and copy the code to deli_import.rb.
The script waits 1 second after each URL since this is required by the delicious API.
Limitations: unfortunately since the Myweb web services only allow the search of public bookmarks, you’ll not be able to migrate private bookmarks. You must do this by hand or wait that Yahoo will release a Myweb webservice that supports authentication.
If you’re looking for an exciting job opportunity in the UK, have a look at the many open positions available in Yahoo!
If you’re interested, get in touch with me and I’ll forward your request to the right people. 
- Engineering Software Developer
- Service Architect
- Service Engineer
- Social Media Engineer
- Web Developer
Or find the job thet’s right for you!
The PHPDay 2007 is over, I enjoyed talking about Yahoo! technologies to the (not so many) people attending the event.
Below you can find the slides of my talk on PHP at Yahoo:
Many thanks to Fullo for organizing the event!
I just received an awesome news from my manager. Two of the most important Yahoo’s platform tools have been published to the Open Source world for your pleasure:
- r3 allows developers of web applications to customize and translate their UI for different languages, markets and uses. It allows developers to modify existing functionality and add new plug-ins via the Stickleback extension engine.
- Stickleback is a general purpose plug-in framework. It ships with tools that allow developers to build and extend PHP command-line and gui applications. It forms the basis of ‘r3′, a web app customization and localization engine.
That’s all for now! More infos to come soon!
