On 16 December, 2010, a leaked slide, purportedly from Yahoo! all-hands meeting, seemed to indicate that Yahoo! was planning to shut down its popular Delicious bookmarking site. Yahoo denies the rumor, but does state that Delicious is not a “strategic fit at Yahoo!”.

Loads of people are now looking for alternatives to Delicious. I have settled on Diigo, for these reasons:

• It has a extension for Google Chrome, the browser I use most these days, as well as a toolbar that will work with other browsers.
• It has an API, though the API is not very well documented.
• It supports essentially the same features as Delicious, with additional capabilities.
• It has both a free and a premium service.
• It works on Linux, not just Mac and Windows. (I use all three, though I spend most of my time on my Mac laptop or on Linux.)

The trick, of course, is getting my Delicious bookmarks into Diigo. Diigo has a web-based service for importing one’s Delicious bookmarks, but it hasn’t worked for me so far. It turns out, however, that it’s not difficult to hack together a quick program to do it manually. Starting with the diigo.py file at slumpy.org, I hacked together a quick Python script, delicious2diigo.py.

To use it, download the script and save it. Then, edit the credential constants at the top of the file to correspond to your Delicious and Diigo login credentials.

If you call it with no arguments:

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    $ python delicious2diigo

it will attempt to download your Delicious bookmarks (as XML), parse them, and upload them to Diigo.

However, if you have already downloaded your Delicious bookmarks as XML, you can simply pass the XML file directly to the script:

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    $ python delicious2diigo bookmarks.xml

The script can take awhile to run, if you have a lot of bookmarks. Diigo’s API apparently accepts up to 100 bookmarks at a time, so the script breaks your bookmarks into chunks of 100. I noticed that Diigo’s API web site occasionally throws HTTP 503 errors (perhaps because it’s overloaded), so the script retries an upload if it receives that error. All other errors cause it to abort with an exception.

I used the script to upload several hundred Delicious bookmarks, and it worked fine for me, preserving the bookmarks’ titles, URLs and tags. Your mileage, of course, may vary.

The script is below. It’s also available as a GitHub gist.