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Scripted Re-Mark: Batch Editing Your Bookmarks

Many bloggers like to bookmark their posts in del.icio.us, whether for their own reference, categories or just getting their links out there. Dealing with a large of collection of bookmarks can be quite unwieldy, especially if you're used to modern niceties likes search-and-replace, macros, wildcards and other "luxuries". Picking out and treating your bookmarks one at a time can be dispiriting. This post introduces a new service I knocked together over the weekend that makes it easy to update and edit your bookmarks wholesale.

The service is dubbed Scripted Re-Mark, since you use a script to "re-mark" your bookmarks. It grew out of my earlier experiments with automatic tagging and frustrations with migrating a blog.

*** Update ***

(There's a new release for Scripted Re-Mark that features zippier updates and functions-as-parameters.)

To use the service, you visit the page, play around with some search/replace rules and then copy/paste a code snippet into another window, opened up to your del.icio.us account. The code snippet zips through the bookmarks, making changes and saving the result.

You can search/replace on the Title, URL, Notes and Tags of your bookmarks, using as many rules as you like. (And, yes, you can use full regular expressions!) You can also set the sharing (public/private) properties. The service deals with the del.icio.us "rate limiter" for you, ensuring that you don't get locked out of your account for thrashing their servers.

Some possible uses:
  • Site Migration: Change the domain name in the URLs of a bunch of bookmarks.

  • Spelling Correction: As a favour, why not fix all the different flavours of spelling, without too much labour?

  • Tag Migration: Delete, merge and rename tags in one hit. Or, add a common tag across a subset of your bookmarks to help with grouping.

  • Share your Imports: By default, imported bookmarks are private; set them all free with a mass "tag and release program".


If you've got more ideas, please share them in the comments, including any regular expressions you come up with.

I've tested it under FireFox and Internet Explorer (I wept tears getting it to work in IE ...) but not Safari or Opera. If someone could let me know how it travels, that'd be great. Still, this is "beta" (not like Google - I mean beta) so please backup your bookmarks before committing anything.

The code is released under a Creative Common licence so feel free to "extend and embrace". Future ideas include allowing generic functions in the replace string, rolling in the auto-tagger for suggestions, deletion and, well, you tell me!

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