Importing Powermarks into Delicious

[james30311]

This is an answer to the many posts on how to import Powermarks into Delicious. I searched the web, contacted the author of Powermarks and could find no way to do it.

I had the same issue and I manually found a way to get Powermarks bookmarks imported into Delicious using only Microsoft Excel. It should take you less than 30 minutes to it.

Steps to import Powermarks into Delicious.com using Microsoft Excel 2003

1. Put a bookmark in Delicious and export bookmark file from Delicious by going under settings then Export / Backup Bookmarks.
2. Export bookmarks from Powermarks under File -> export as type delimited ASCII.
3. Open the exported Powermarks text file in Excel.
4. Put columns in order of url, keywords, then title and delete all remaining columns.
5. Setup the Excel sheet with the following columns to mimic the exported Delicious file format. Copy and paste the test string following each column name into the first cell of each column then copy and paste that cell all the way down the column to the last row of your bookmarks. (The text is exact after the Column letters and spaces with the red lines as the original data columns from Powermarks):
Column A <DL><p><DT><A HREF="
Column B The url field
Column C " TAGS="
Column D The keywords field
Column E ">
Column F The bookmark name field
Column G </A></DL><p>

6. Select keywords column and go under Edit -> replace put a space in the find what field and a comma in the replace with field. This will put commas in the place of all the spaces in between the keywords.
7. Press ctrl-a to select whole sheet and go under Data -> filter -> autofilter . Open the filter cell in the first row of the url column. Select custom and do contains file: Then delete all those rows to get rid of the file bookmarks.
8. Do ctrl-a to select whole sheet then ctrl-c to copy then open notepad.exe and ctrl-v to paste sheet.
9. In notepad highlight and copy one of the tab characters placed in the rows as field separators, then go under edit and replace and paste the tab character in the find what field and hit replace all to get rid of the tab delimiters.
10. Copy top part of Delicious export file before first <DL><p><DT> line and paste into top of Powermarks notepad file, change both instances of the word bookmarks to Powermarks. Make sure all format exactly matches original Delicious download file.
11. Save the notepad file as powermarks.htm
12. Go in delicious.com, go under settings and Import / Upload Bookmarks. At the bottom select manual import. Delete "imported" out of tag field and hit Import Now.
13. You should get a success statement and your bookmarks should now begin showing up under bookmarks.

[fjordaan2000]

Hi James,

Bravo. I was one of those unlucky souls who spent years begging Kaylon and Yahoo [1] and the lazyweb in general to create a Powermarks-Delicious importer. (I think -- and suggested -- Kaylon could've extended Powermarks' lifespan as a product by updating it to sync to Delicious, but to no avail.)

[1] http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/ydn-delicious/message/215

You seem to have succeeded where I failed. It looks like your method loses the bookmark creation date, however, which I considered of vital importance.

What I ended up doing was to import my bookmarks into Netvouz.com, a lower-tier online bookmarking service, whose creator wrote a Powermarks importer. (Why couldn't Delicious?) This has served me well enough over the last 2 years, but it's not being actively developed, doesn't have an API, so I still would prefer being on Delicious.

So, I still have a problem. Netvouz claims to export bookmarks in Delicious-compatible format, but when I attempted to import that into Delicious, the tags get messed up (connected with
underscores), probably due to bad markup in the bookmark file. I could probably fix it myself if I knew what it needed to look like.

Delicious "customer care" has been hopeless. I have asked them to provide me with an example of correct markup for a Delicious bookmark, but I've never received anything back except boilerplate "We have escalated this to our Engineering Department and hope that it will be resolved soon."

Anyway, I realise this is somewhat irrelevant to your original post. But do you, by any chance, have an example of bookmark HTML that Delicious imports correctly?

Regards,

francois

[Rocco Caputo]

Hi, Francois.

Delicious looks for tags separated by commas in bookmarks.html. If
you have three tags, "this one", "that one" and "the other" (without
the quotes), then your bookmark would look something like this:

<A HREF="http://example.com/" ...
TAGS="this_one,that_one,the_other" ...>Example Bookmark!</A>

You can see more examples by bookmarking something in Delicious with
more than one tag, then exporting your Delicious bookmarks.

I hope this helps.
--
Rocco Caputo - Delicious

Post by fjordaan2000
So, I still have a problem. Netvouz claims to export bookmarks in
Delicious-compatible format, but when I attempted to import that
into Delicious, the tags get messed up (connected with
underscores), probably due to bad markup in the bookmark file. I
could probably fix it myself if I knew what it needed to look like.

[fjordaan2000]

Hi Rocco, James,

Thanks for the advice -- a few regular expressions later, and my bookmarks imported with the tags successfully preserved.

Just one more problem. It seems to have used the wrong date field. Powermarks has the following 3 date fields:

ADD_DATE="972230504" LAST_VISIT="972230504" LAST_MODIFIED="1188335016"

Where Add Date is all I care about, and the above number should be equivalent to 2000-10-22

After importing, the bookmark in question shows a date of 31 Dec 2002 instead, which I assume is one of the other fields.

What should I rename ADD_DATE to? Or should I just delete the others?

I'll have to delete my account and re-import everything (why is the batch delete function so feeble?), but I really want the dates to be correct.

francois

[Rocco Caputo]

ADD_DATE is correct. We have a known problem with really early
ADD_DATEs that should be fixed in the next few weeks.
--
Rocco Caputo - Delicious

Post by fjordaan2000
Hi Rocco, James,
Thanks for the advice -- a few regular expressions later, and my
bookmarks imported with the tags successfully preserved.
Just one more problem. It seems to have used the wrong date field.
ADD_DATE="972230504" LAST_VISIT="972230504" LAST_MODIFIED="1188335016"
Where Add Date is all I care about, and the above number should be equivalent to 2000-10-22
After importing, the bookmark in question shows a date of 31 Dec
2002 instead, which I assume is one of the other fields.
What should I rename ADD_DATE to? Or should I just delete the others?
I'll have to delete my account and re-import everything (why is the
batch delete function so feeble?), but I really want the dates to be
correct.
francois

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[fjordaan2000]

Hi Rocco,

Post by Rocco Caputo
ADD_DATE is correct. We have a known problem with really early
ADD_DATEs that should be fixed in the next few weeks.

So I don't need to do anything but wait?

After importing, a large number of my bookmarks ended up with the date 31 Dec 2002, and none older than that. (I have 2256 bookmarks older than that, dating back to October 2000.)

I'd really appreciate an email when this issue is fixed, since I don't always read the ydn-delicious digests.

francois