I keep a copy of every bookmark on a site called del.icio.us. I also shared all of my educational links with a network of people. Many people have thanked me for those links over the years. However, in the last year, after being passed around to buyers a few times, del.icio.us seems to be falling apart. They no longer provide a way to export your links, and I did not have a recent backup (my poor planning). I had 3736 bookmarks in jeopardy and no way to get them out.
I searched the web and found nothing. I then searched Twitter and stumbled onto this post by D.A. Gutierrez:
So @Delicious is dead & they disabled export. If your data is trapped, I can help. No charge&no strings attached. #FreeTheData
— D.A. Gutierrez (@dagutierrez) February 25, 2017
I reached out to him via Twitter and he offered two options: 1. he would move everything for me. or 2. he'd give me a link to some code (written by Krzysztof Szafranek) and detailed instructions on how to run it myself.
I took option 2 and his instructions were spot on and worked perfectly. I even ran it for a friend and sent him all of his 17,000+ bookmarks for safe keeping.
D.A. also provided me with a half-dozen choices for new bookmarking software. I went for Pinboard. You can follow my educational links here:
https://pinboard.in/u:arvind/t:21apples/ (there is an RSS feed available, too). I paid $11 a year for the privilege, and will now back up my links 1x/month. They make many export options available.
These bookmarks (most public, some private) are a way for me to organize my resources and access them from any computer. Were it not for D.A., my work since 2005 would have been lost into the Internet ether.
I'm grateful today. Thank you, D.A.
note: I came out of blog hiding to write this in case it helped a single other del.icio.us user.
