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Last active March 17, 2018 17:51
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How to export Delicious bookmarks for Evernote (June 2016)

How to export Delicious bookmarks for Evernote (June 2016)

Delicious is going into disrepair, so I needed to find another home for my bookmarks. The transfer to Evernote was causing me headaches (since most things I found online no longer worked) so when I figured it out, I thought I'd document how I got it to work, for posterity.

Goal

Take Delicious bookmarks with tags, and create a new Bookmarks notebook in Evernote (basic/free version) which contains a new note for each old bookmark, with tags intact.

Steps

  1. Export bookmarks from Delicious
  • I had found a blog post from 2010 saying to export your bookmarks using the old API (by doing curl https://USERNAME:PASSWORD@api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all) but realized that the API isn't working any longer.
  • Solution:
    • Log into Delicious > Profile > Export (or this direct link), click Export. This will give you a "bookmark-formatted" HTML file.
  1. Convert the Delicious HTML file to an Evernote XML file
  • I had found another blog post from 2014 for this, but it did weird stuff creating subfolders for tags that I didn't want. I wanted all notes in a single notebook, no subfolders, each with its correct tags.
  • Also, some of my bookmarks exported with empty tags, which crashed Evernote during import, so I fixed that by either using a special new tag (if the bookmark's only tag was empty) or by ignoring it (if it had other tags anyway).
  • Solution:
    • Use this modified fiddle instead. Save the resulting XML as a file with a .enex extension.
    • Make sure it doesn't contain any empty attributes like <tag></tag> or otherwise.
  1. Import the XML file in Evernote
  • In Evernote, do File > Import Notes... and select your .enex file.
  • It should create a new Notebook with the name of your file, and put the new bookmarks/notes in there. I renamed the Notebook to "Bookmarks". Then it asks if you want the Notebook to be synched or only local (I chose synched, cuz that's the point, no?).

That's all, folks!

@trmwzm
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trmwzm commented Jan 2, 2017

What I can do is manually "save-page-as" after login, then parse the html file from browser, what parser should I use ?

@dash9483
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Thanks for this. Pity that Evernote doesn't seem to be able to save the old Delicious descriptions along with the tags.

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