I signed up to Blinklist a long time ago, because it seemed to be the only web bookmarking service with a private flag on bookmarks. Since then two things have happened: one, del.icio.us added a privacy option, and two, the Blinklist service degraded. Or at least didn’t get any better. I now find it frequently unresponsive, unreliable in listing my tags, and infuriating that I cannot bookmark the page with by tag cloud because it’s Ajaxified. Oh, and I rather resent the way it pollutes the interweb with every page title of the form “Discover the best <insert tag here>”.

I had hoped to move my tags into Firefox 3, with it’s new super-duper tagging/places/bookmarks system, and sync it with a central service. But it turns out there’s no easy Blinklist-Firefox-WebService export-import-sync system just yet. In fact, although Blinklist does allow you to export your bookmarks (I made damned sure that feature was there before I put my data in it) there aren’t any web services that openly accept their particular form of JSON or XML or HTML.

But…! I discovered the super-slick del.icio.us Firefox plugin which is such a compelling addon I forced myself to make the death-defying leap. Much hacking tonight has produced this manoeuvre:

1. Export Blinklist bookmarks as JSON.
2. Break open the del.icio.us plugin’s jar file to get at the Javascript and XUL files.
3. Change the chome.manifest to reference the broken-out files.
4. Find the add-bookmark Javascript file and augment it like this
   • Add your JSON bookmarks in a named datastructure;
   • Add a counter over these bookmarks, initially set to zero;
   • Insert a function to take the next bookmark, copy its info into the add-bookmark dialog (name, URL, privacy flag, tags transformed to fit del.icio.us’s no-spaces policy), increment the counter, and call the save-bookmark function;
   • Change the save-bookmark function so that it doesn’t close the dialog.
5. Augment the add-bookmark-dialog XUL file to include a new button which, when pressed, calls your new function.
6. Open up Firefox.
7. Open the augmented add-bookmark dialog.
8. Click-click-click your special button and watch as each of your Blinklist bookmarks appears in the dialog, saves into del.icio.us, and moves on to the next one.
9. Go to your del.icio.us page and correct any errors that crept in due to your slightly shonky coding.

Choose your own ending.

For those over 40: “And with a bound he was free.”

For 25-40 year-olds: Stretch arms wide in pouring rain as camera looks down and music swells.

For those under 25: Punch air; freeze-frame.

Tags: blinklist, del.icio.us, bookmarks, hacking