Bookmarks

Bookmarks. I've got a lot of them. I've got a few I use often. Sometimes I think the chief value of bookmarks is that I can park something there and pretend like I'll have it when I want it.

For the moment, I've signed up for a Pinboard account, and I loaded all my Google Chrome bookmarks into it. Now I've got to come up with a policy for what goes into Pinboard and what goes into my browser bookmarks.

I tried using a Chrome extension to synch Pinboard with Chrome bookmarks. It sounds like a good idea. The problem is that Chrome uses folders to organize, and Pinboard uses tags to organize. Pinboard synch takes a rational approach. It maps a folder to a tag, 1 for 1. So if you have a bookmark B, in folder F in Chrome, it lands in Pinboard as a bookmark B tagged with F. So far, so good.

But what happens when you tag B with F, G, and H? It winds up in Chrome in folder F, folder G, and folder H. Not so good, but tolerable.

But what happens if you have bookmark B, and it is stored in folder F, which is a sub-folder of G, which is a subfolder of H? i.e. H/G/F/B.

• First it syncs to Pinboard with tags H, G, and F.
• Then in syncs back to Chrome in folders H, G, and F.
• Then you realize that it just flattened your folders into a single level, and you restore from your Xmarks backup.

So here's how i'm going to decide what goes into Pinboard and what goes into Chrome.

• If I use it frequently, it goes into Chrome.
• If it is a bookmarklet, it goes into Chrome.
• If it is something that applies only to the local compter (e.g. a file:// URL), it goes into Chrome.
• Everything other than bookmarklets and local URLs goes into Pinboard.

What I'd like is to have a way to replicate Chrome bookmarks into Pinboard, tagged as from-Chrome, and if I delete a bookmark in Chrome which is tagged solely as from-Chrome, the delete gets replicated too. I'd happily settle for replicating new/changed bookmarks to Pinboard. (I can live with deletes that didn't happen.)

I don't see how to make that happen using off-the-shelf tools. I could cobble together something -- perhaps a Perl script run from cron to download from Xmarks and push to Pinboard (without creating duplicates).

While Xmarks doesn't offer a proper API, you can get an RSS feed by selecting "Classic View" (not "Grid View"), selecting your top-level Bookmarks folder, and clicking "Share" on the toolbar.