Ardekantur » bookmarks

Uproar.rb: Using Ruby and YAML to keep bookmarks

Code Projects, uproar — Tags: bookmarks, delicious, Ruby, YAML — Ardekantur @ 6:48 pm

I use del.icio.us, but I don’t like the idea that I don’t have control of the server, so if something happens to my bookmarks, I’m screwed. I also want more universal integration of my bookmarks with all the browsers I used - from Lynx to Opera. So I wrote some Ruby.

delicious-to-yaml.rb

require 'rubygems' 
require 'hpricot' 
doc = open("links.html") { |f| Hpricot(f) } 
(doc/"a").each do |link| 
    puts "---" 
    puts "title: '#{link.inner_html.gsub(/'/, '\'\'')}'" 
    puts "link: #{link.attributes['href']}" 
    tags = link.attributes['tags'] ? link.attributes['tags'].gsub(/,/, ', ') : '' 
    puts "tags: [#{tags}]" 
end

Go to https://secure.del.icio.us/settings/<your delicious username>/bookmarks/export - uncheck ‘include my notes’, but keep ‘include my tags’ checked. Save the result to links.html, then run the code above in the same directory as links.html. Pipe the output to another file, like Links.yaml. This is your new bookmark repository. Each link is a separate document, like the following:

--- 
title: 'I speak dog » Using GnuPG encyption with Mac OS X Mail' 
link: http://www.wasuvi.com/?page_id=2368 
tags: [apple, howto, osx, gpg, security, email, toread] 
--- 
title: 'All recipes – complete resource for recipes and cooking tips' 
link: http://allrecipes.com/ 
tags: [recipes, howto, health, toread]

So on, so forth. This is obviously very human readable - you can simply add new links to the file by typing them in yourself. The next step is a file which asks for a tag and gives you the links that are tagged with it:

uproar.rb

require 'yaml' 
 
def set_option hash, name, default 
  i = ARGV.index(name) 
  raise "no argument specified" unless i 
  hash[name] = default and return unless i 
  raise "no argument specified: #{name}" if(ARGV.length &lt;= i) 
  hash[name] = ARGV[i + 1] 
end 
 
o = {} 
set_option o, '-t', nil 
 
raise "please specify a tag." if o['-t'] == nil 
 
links = File.open( 'Links.yaml' ) 
db = [] 
YAML::load_documents( links ) { |doc| db &lt;&lt; doc } 
 
matches = [] 
db.each { |l| matches &lt;&lt; l if l['tags'].include? o['-t'] } 
matches.each { |l| printf "%30s... - %s\n", l['title'][0..30], l['link'] }

It’s a little ugly right now, but it does what it’s supposed to do. That is Uproar.

Possible Improvements

Open random link containing tag in web browser
Add links to yaml file by command line
Use the del.icio.us API to get links
Use the del.icio.us API to sync links
Use the Yaml API instead of just formatting strings

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