Original post is here: eklausmeier.goip.de
I have been a loyal user of del.icio.us since 2006. I have written on this in my post Saving URLs in del.icio.us Still Troublesome. But now enough is enough. Here is a list of annoyances:
- You can neither export nor import your data anymore.
- The service is generally slow, i.e., it takes a lot of time to just load the site in your browser.
- The service is sometimes not available.
- You cannot change URLs without deleting the entire post.
- The company behind the service does not answer any inquires.
- The site is blocked by a number of company firewalls because it is marked as "social".
[more_WP_Tag]The first mentioned annoyance was now the turning point to hack together two Perl scripts to get the content into WordPress. The challenge with this was: As there is no longer an export file one has to resort to the del.icio.us website, page-down as long as all relevant entries are shown, and then save this HTML-file. Luckily I had an export file dating back to 25-Oct-2014. So I combined the export file with the web-content. This was then imported to WordPress.
My first aim was to bring together this blog and my more than 2,000 links into a single blog, i.e., this blog. Unfortunately this is not really satisfactory, as my list of links will then either intermix with my regular blog-posts, or I have to set up a static page, and then use categories to switch between the other WordPress pages, see Category Pages. The catch here is:
If you don’t want posts displaying on any page other than their designated category pages, you can set up a static front page and not designate any page for your posts page. Remember to add your static home page to your custom menu.
Also, as I use Publicize, I would have to specifically suppress this feature for my links, where I don't want to tell the world on my newly detected URLs. So the best solution seemed to be to create a completely new blog. This solves the separation issue, the Publicize issue, and it was good while importing to WordPress, as to not break existing posts.
It is quite surprising that I did not come up with this solution much earlier, as I actively use WordPress since 2012. I searched for a way that the link (URL) is the title, and the snippet of the content behind the link the actual post. This can be achieved with the "Link-Format" for a blog-post. I had never used this before. This allows you to highlight links in your post. This is exactly what I wanted with my long list of URLs. Although the "Link-Format" highlights all text looking like URLs.
Perl script delicious2wp converts del.icio.us export-file to WordPress post-format, i.e., WordPress eXtended RSS (WXR), see The WordPress eXtended Rss (WXR) Export/Import, XML Document Format Decoded and Explained. Perl script deliciousweb2wp converts the raw HTML file to WordPress post-format. I left out a number of XML tags, because I thought WordPress would generate them automatically, which it did. I checked my output with xmllint. At first I exported my blog, then had a look at the XML file, after that I hand-guessed what probably would need to go into the export file in my case. If you want to use these scripts for your case you have to change the blog-name, here klmlinks.wordpress.com, and blogger-name, here eklausmeier. I added command-line argument -o for an offset in the post_id, and -n to limit the number of posts to convert. The last option is mainly for testing, i.e., just try to import a few posts. I exported my newly created blog, then searched for the highest post_id, added some safety margin, then this was my offset.
1perl -ne 'print "$1\n" if /<wp:post_id>(\d+)/' elmarklausmeier039sweblog.wordpress.2015-01-01.xml | sort -n | tail
post_id's in the export file are not necessarily in consecutive order and some numbers might be missing.
I checked whether my new blog contained the links I wanted.
1perl -ne 'print "$1\n" if /^<DT><A HREF="http(.+)" ADD_DATE=/' D > Dref
2perl -ne 'print "$1\n" if /^ <a href="http(.+)" class=/' F > Fref
3sort Fref Dref > deliciousURLs
4perl -ne 'print "$1\n" if /^ <content:encoded><!\[CDATA\[<a href="http(.+)">/' collectedlinks.wordpress.2015-01-04.xml | sort > blogURLs
5diff deliciousURLs blogURLs
Exporting your blog is usually quite quick, i.e., a few seconds. Importing into your blog is asynchronous, i.e., you receive an e-mail once WordPress has imported all your data. This might take 10-20 minutes. In particular I noted that importing double entries might eradicate the whole import.
Added 13-May-2015: It looks like import and export functionality in delicious.com is again working.
Added 22-Apr-2017: delicious.com no longer exists, you have to use del.icio.us.