BenBishop.me.uk

Whoot, Del.icio.us is up and running again! After Del.icio.us has been down, on and off, for the last week I was delighted to find this morning it up and running again. With the initial power outages that disrupted their datacenter and the resulting problems that snowballed around them, I am very relieved to find what appears to be no loss of data, certainly to my account anyway. It has made me realise how much I appreciate this valuable service though and how much I rely on it.

This downtime should bring these services back into perspective though. Hands up how many of you had a back up of these online bookmarks? I was fortunate in this regard in that I am a beta user of Flock which syncronises with my del.icious account so by design I had an offline copy. This I would guess is the exception rather than the rule and I was lucky.

The solution to this is actually rather a simple case of making use of the API made available to everyone. Head to http://del.icio.us/api/posts/all and enter in your account information if you aren’t already logged into Del.icio.us. The result is an XML file, tags and all, that can be saved and stored for safe keeping or imported into another bookmarking site.

Mmmmm…..All we need now is a firefox extension that will periodically export your bookmarking site of choice and update three or four ‘other’ bookmarking sites.