I sure hope not :-) Well, I felt defeated the other day when I lost all my Blinklist bookmarks because I wanted to make some mass changes and figured that the Blinklist XML backup format would be the best to work with to do it. Go figure. They have a wonderful site and it is so useful and easy to use with its nifty Ajax widgets. You would think that their own backup format could be imported back into the system. No, leave it to me to find an undocumented feature and lose all of my 2400+ bookmarks!
Well, I did not lose them totally. I still had the Blinklist XML format file. For restores/imports, Blinklist also accepts several other formats, including JavaScript Object Notation or JSON. So, what could it take? Flip a few tags, change a few names? I started by reading an article on O'Reilly's XML web site about converting between XML and JSON. The article gives a very straightforward set of examples of how the structures vary and rules binding the conversion.
I did find a few modules out on CPAN that did conversions, but most were small code fragments that would have required more work than I had time to tie together. I took a look at the Blinklist XML file. The XML was well-formed and appeared to be a straight one-to-one conversion to JSON with a few minor tag/ID name changes.
So, I put together 70 lines of perl code and converted the Blinklist XML file into a new JSON file. I tried it first on the dozen links I already added to my new (temporary I hope) Blinklist, exporting in both XML and JSON formats, creating my own JSON version, comparing the two, and then importing both to check for differences. None found!
So why I am asking if I may have caused some heartburn for Blinklist is that... well... no response from the helm, Mr. Scott :-( Just in case my Blinklist is locked during import and the reason I am not seeing it, I went to the root page of the web site and... well... nothing there either :-( Mike, if you are scurrying aroun, trying to get the servers back on the air, my apologies if it was my little ol' fault. I find that doubtful, but best to cover all the bases.
Soon, I hope to report that my full Blinklist is back in business!
Update! SUCCESS! My old Blinklist is back online!
Recently in Blinklist Category
Ok, have I become a Blinker? Damn straight! It is now obvious with the addition of a Blink It! link at the bottom of every post. The Blinklist team has instructions for adding a Blink It! link for Blogger and WordPress, as well as generic instructions for other blogs. Well, since I use MovableType, I took a few minutes to hack into my templates and figure out how to do it.
So, here's the way to do it. You have to open up to four templates, depending upon the archiving method you use: Main Index, Category Archive, Date-based Archive, and Individual Entry Archive. i placed the Blink It! link right after the Permalink in each entry. You can opt for either using the Blink graphic or a text link. I opted for the latter since it fit in better with my layout. Here is the code you need to paste into the template to generate the link with your entry's title, permalink, and tag. Note that I am terrible about tagging the category for entries so I just used the blog title entry. So here is the code required:
Blink It! with the graphic:
Blink It! with a text link:
Remember that when you are done modifying your templates, you must rebuild your site for the changes to take affect!
So, share the love! Feel free to steal the code for your MT blog!
Blinklist gets another gold star, a big one in my book. It all has to do with backup, something that most geeky types forget about until they hit an oops. So, like a good boy, I backed up my Blinklist and what did I get but an RSS feed of all my links! No more IE/Netscape favorites, but a well thought out XML feed. Here is a sample entry:
<item> <title>Virtual Network Computing - Wikipedia</title> <description>VNC Wikipedia entry</description> <link>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vnc</link> <guid></guid> <pubDate>1162749883</pubDate> <private></private> <favourite></favourite> <category>Geekdom,Remote_Access,VNC</category> </item>The field names have obvious meaning and are easily parsed. The publication date is based on the standard UNIX epoch. The fields private and favourite are either blank or have a value of on and the field category is easy to parse with simple comma delimiting. Now I am off to pull together a few perl modules to play with this puppy! Kudos to the Blinklist team!
