After the recent takeover of Delicious from Yahoo Inc by Avos and the subsequent total screw-up of what was a workable system I have been struggling to export bookmarks from Delicious in XML format (since the API is badly broken). The API export of all bookmarks limits the export to 1000 bookmark entries. Which is fine if you have less than 1000 bookmarks stored. But it makes it impossible (since there is no paging functionality exposed by the API) to export the rest should you have more (and many people would have much more than that).
After two weeks worth of helpdesk emails from Avos I got this (which does not sound very comforting that these guys well ever get it sorted):
-------------------------------------------- Although we have several engineers, the main guy dealing with API coding has been out with the Flu so progress on this issue is slow. Ever since our launch last week all our engineers have been working and pushing really hard trying to fix bugs so hopefully we can get to this issue soon. We have a community based thread going on at http://support.delicious.com/delicious/topics/api_related_bugs_and_questions If you post this up, one of the engineers or other users may be able to chime in. Hope that helps for now. Sorry for any inconveniences. --------------------------------------------
NOTE: if you only need a simple HTML export go here: http://delicious.com/settings/
After some digging I found the IP Addresses of the OLD DELICIOUS SERVERS (on Yahoo – which luckily are still live ! – as at 13th Oct 2011)
Edit you hosts file and add:
98.139.50.166 www.delicious.com 76.13.6.190 secure.delicious.com 76.13.6.209 static.delicious.com 98.139.50.166 api.del.icio.us
(this can be found on /etc/hosts on Linux or C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts on Windows).
After editing this file you can again go to: https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all and you will get ALL your bookmarks you had added to Delicious before the takeover (less the ones you added on the new Avos Server)
Another lesson in what can happen if you let other people take care of your information for free. You get what you pay for. Thank you to Yahoo for making this a nice service for years. But time to take control of my bookmarks again using SemanticScuttle.
Good bye Delicious – it was nice working with you. But I don’t think I like where you are going …
Thank you for your information, but I think the HTML export may be broken too…
THANK. YOU. sooo much for this! seriously it worked fine for me, took me abt 20 mins to save all info from two accounts one of which had literally vanished and both of which I had relied on in truly naive loyalty for yrs..
@vincicat: STILL possible as of Oct 17, this worked best for me: in a fresh browser window, going right to the OLD https login page with a bit of to and fro (maybe you have the link in your browser history, if so copy, delete browser history again, reopen etc).
Once you get the page with the user name and pw fields, you’re GOOD. Try and login DON’T be discouraged when you’re redirected to the new site. Just go back one step in your browser, resend forms if called for, and you might just already be logged in!! — EVEN IF the user/password main window says Invalid Password! Check the top right hand corner! if you see your user name there, jump and prance and go right to settings, export your bookmarks into an html file and smugly delete the entire old account! If not, flush DNS, reopen browser, etc few more times, it works.
So, thats just my experience now I finally made it.. sad somehow that the only way to get this sorted out is in fact the workaround, the apparently indirect way. all direct contact with avos has been one-sided, and yahoo just point you to the new support… in any case, hacking the old account turns out to be alot *less* tedious than writing un- or autoanswered support e-mails to no avail…
wouldn’t have thought a couple of weeks ago that a. the first “hack” of my life would be my OWN delicious account, I’m just this regular -uncritical- user.. and b. that this “move” would turn out to be the first big web 2.0 fail I’d experience.
sry for verbose commentary, but really I m grateful for this elegant solution. these days and weeks trying to get any info at all out of the former and current owner have apparently left me rather wound up about a probably perfectly innocent company takeover, but what I did want to say is, you’re right: finding the comfortable delicious browser plugin which I’ve been an avid user of for years just suddenly awol does teach you a lesson.. strange, not really saying goodbye to delicious but more failing to say hello to Avos. In any case, I’m out.
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Thank you for this excellent blog post. What AVOS did in limiting the export is outrageous and inexcusable!
Unfortunately, I have over 14k bookmarks, so the curl download timed out after 3+ minutes.
Ultimately I managed to export everything with https://github.com/l0b0/export/blob/master/Delicious.sh — most recommended to everybody who has their data jailed by AVOS at the new Delicious!
BTW, if you’re looking for the Delicious.sh script (no longer on the Github site), you can find it here: http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/21308/export-all-delicious-bookmarks