Blinklist: December 2007 Archives

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!