I've been thinking about switching to XMarks for bookmark synchronisation, and since purchasing a netbook I decided to jump on in and start the process of transferring everything over from Delicious, where I currently keep my bookmarks for online access. Problem number one is that XMarks can only import the 100 most recent bookmarks from Delicious. No problem, I thought, I'll just go through Delicious deleting my most recent bookmarks since I plan to shut the account down anyway. It'll be a bit of a pain, but I'll get over it.
I also figured that XMarks would notice the duplicates (if any) and ignore them. After deleting a few from Delicious and trying a second import, I noticed two things. One, XMarks does NOT notice duplicates or remove them. It puts each import into a separate dated folder, duplicates and all. Two, XMarks lumps all tags for an item into one. So rather than being filed under the tags "video" and "funny", I have items filed under the one compound tag "video funny", and a hundred other combination examples. I don't like that.
Mokalus of Borg
PS - So now I don't know what to do.
PPS - For the moment, because of the import troubles, I think I'll stick to Delicious.
4 comments:
ugh, i came across your blog entry on searching for peoples thoughts on the two. ive used delicious for years. but the lack of a decent plugin for chrome or safari has made me look at xmarks. im in the process of importing into xmarks right now. your entry makes me wonder whether its the right choice...
Well, it might still be the right choice for you, but it's not for me. It's always going to be a bit different, so you just have to decide whether you can do without the things you'll leave behind.
I just made the switch today. The trick is to export your Delicious bookmarks to an HTML file. Then, Chrome didn't have anyway to do anything with that file, but Firefox let me import them. I then imported Firefox's bookmarks into Chrome and used the XMarks plugin to sync from Chrome. It sounds convoluted, but actually took me less than 5 minutes to do the whole thing once I figured out what to do. I think I've lost my Delicious tags though.
I haven't actually had a need to switch yet. I'm actively using both Chrome and Firefox, and each one has a working Delicious plugin, though with different features.
All the methods I've seen for exporting bookmarks from Delicious have left the tags behind, and I really don't want that. If I ever need to switch to another bookmark manager, it's my tags that I'll miss the most.
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