OK, it is not the end of the world yet, but a leaked screenshot of the latest Yahoo all-hands shows that delicious has no bright future in the company.

So in order to preserve the years of work I put into this web service of awesome I am backing up my data. There are a few simple ways:

• Go to the terminal and do a “curl https://{your username}:{your password}@api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all > bookmarks.xml” to get an XML file of your bookmarks
• Go to https://secure.delicious.com/settings/bookmarks/export to download an HTML document with your bookmarks

You can then import and sync your bookmarks in your browser of choice or upload them to Google Docs.

As to the future? Who knows?

For the last few months, I have always collected some links from my reader every Thursday morning and published them on the Yahoo Developer Network blog. Now that I am leaving Yahoo people asked me how that would go on. As I cannot access the blog from outside the company network I said I’d build a system that allows the editor taking over to simply copy and paste the collected links in the morning.

Update: Apparently that wasn’t needed as Tom is taking over Tech Thursday:

Anyways, the script still works :)

Normally I would use YQL to do something like that but I once again found that sometimes the most simple is the best.

I am using del.icio.us to collect my links anyways, so I thought the easiest is to tag the ones I want added with “4ydn”. That took care of the collection. Now to add the description for all the links, I just used the notes field in delicious and a placeholder. For example “{3D Pong in jQuery} is quite a lot of fun”:

All I needed to do then is getting the links as a JSON object and replace the opening brace with the anchor opening tag and the closing brace with the anchor closing tag.

You can get the links as JSON with the tried-and-true delicious feed output http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/json/codepo8/4ydn?count=50&callback=ydntt

The function for display then is very simple indeed:

Putting all together there is now the Techthursday generator.

Things that made me happy this morning:

I just arrived in Atlanta for Georgia Tech University hack day and the weather is awesome. I spent the day in the sun in cafes writing my slides for the Mix10 conference next week and now I am going through my feeds. So time for another TTMMHTM:

• YouTube is changing its URLs – this didn’t really make me happy but it means I know why some people cannot use Easy YouTube at the moment and I know now that it is easy to fix.
• Google released a Public Data Directory taking government data and running it through the visualization API to allow you to directly embed charts into your pages. The Guardian’s World Government Data collection is still much more detailed but well done Google.
• The Humunga Stache Dog Toy makes me wish I had a dog to mess with.
• Carsonified/ThinkVitamin released my article on GeoExplorer and using Yahoo’s geo technology
• Creative people rock: 45 robots build with everyday trash
• Packrati.us is a service to automatically add URLs you tweet about to del.icio.us – this saves me some time!
• RadarVirtuel is a live map of aircraft and where they are right at this moment, where they came from and where they are headed.
• What do you suggest? takes a seed from you (or gives you something random) then guides you on a journey through language and the collective lives of Google users.
• GestureCons are a set of icons for touch-screen devices. My favourite is the two finger slide which in England doesn’t go down well as it also is the two finger salute

If you scroll down the older entries of this blog you’ll see that there is a new feature, namely a box that shows reader tags and a link to del.icio.us:

This is not a WordPress plugin (although it would be easy to make and i’d be amazed if it hadn’t been done) but pure JavaScript. You can also download the script that does this and use the following to embed it in any page you’d like to know the delicious data for:

There is not much magic going on here, I basically souped up the example on the del.icio.us site,minified and embedded Paul Johnson’s implementation of MD5 in JavaScript and created the necessary HTML.

The HTML structure inside the DIV will be a definition list with tags as dd’s and the text as the dt and a paragraph with a link. You can style it by using the #deliciousinfo ID.

I like the outcome and I am always amazed what good tags readers of my stuff come up with. If you want to know, get the src commented version and check the information in there.

Shall I create a WordPress plugin for this?

Edit: if you wondered what the difference to the tagometer is, there isn’t much, I just forgot about it….