Migrating from Blinklist to Delicious using PHP

May 31, 2010

I’m done with Blinklist. Before this I want to get back the bookmarks so that I can use them in my browser or other social bookmarking website. There is no one-step solution. I hope this article can help people who has this need too.

Preparing the CSV file

The first step is to export your bookmarks from Blinklist. Although the website seems to allow you to choose from 3 export formats, you can only get a CSV file (in fact it is a TSV file). Unfortunately you cannot import this file to your browser directly because the format is incompatible. We need to convert the file to a normal bookmark file. In this case, IE bookmark format is a desirable choice because it is recgonized by most browsers (Firefox, Chrome, etc.) and other social bookmarking website such as Delicious and it can be easily created.

The following step is not necessary unless your bookmarks have Asian characters. Why? Because the PHP script that we will use later has a command – fgetcsv. This command is not 100% safe for Asian characters. There are some solutions but I think the easiest way in this situation is to use a spreadsheet software to add dobule quotation mark as text delimiter for every field.

I use Open Office Calc as demonstration:

First we import the bookmark file, note that we need to set the character set to UTF-8, and the field delimiter as Tab instead of Comma. Every bookmark is a row in the sheet. You can easily delete bookmarks that you don’t want to keep/import. (Sorry, OO does not allow changing back the user interface to English)

After that, we save the file as another CSV file, OO will prompt you to choose the field delimiter and text delimiter. Select Tab and double quotation mark respectively.

Creating a browser bookmark file

The next step is to create the bookmark file. Ruben Laguna has written an excellent script in Ruby to convert the CSV file to an IE bookmark file. I think many people are more comfortable with PHP so I re-create the script in PHP.

<?php
<!– This is an automatically generated file. It will be read and overwritten. Do Not Edit! –>
Bookmarks
<h1>Bookmarks</h1>
<dl>
EOH;
fwrite($f, $header);
$row = 0;
// replace the filename if needed, remember to put it under the same folder of this script
if (($handle = fopen("bookmarkall.csv", "r")) !== FALSE) {
while (($data = fgetcsv($handle, 1000, "\t")) !== FALSE) {
if ($row==0) {$row++; continue;} // skip the first line
$url = $data[0];
$title = $data[1];
$description = $data[2];
$tags = $data[3];
fwrite($f, "
<dt><a href="\">$title</a>
</dt>
<dd>$description\n");
}
fclose($handle);
}
fwrite($f, "</dd>
</dl>
");
fclose($f);
echo "
Success!
";
echo "
Please right-click to save the <a href="\">Bookmarks file</a>
";
?>

The bookmark file is created and ready to be imported to your favorite browser. Of course, we can use another social marketing service like Delicious. Luckily, the tags can be preserved too. The only limitation is that the date of bookmark creation cannot be kept. You can see that the date is set manually in the conversion script because it is not available in the CSV file.